A mirrored bar and Louis Vuitton trunk make an elegant pair in the dining room. “The trunk holds throws, so it’s also functional,” the designer notes. FACING PAGE: The dining area’s handsome metal-legged table makes room for twelve. The pre-Columbian artifact atop the console hails from the owner’s collection.
As the CEO of a Manhattanbased human capital company, Michele James was already busy enough. Then someone made an unexpected offer on her country house, and James found herself with just one week to find a new Litchfield County retreat. Having renovated six homes in the area, ranging from a lakeside cabin to a grand center colonial, James is not one to back off a challenge. So, come the eighth night, she was there with an air mattress in her new getaway—once an old dairy barn—as content as she could be. And content is precisely how she remains. Sure, the burning bush hedges begged for haircuts, and dozens of trees had grown far too close, but James handed over her heart at the threshold. The quirky 1901 structure had witnessed its share of tenants—cows included, of course, and once, the ambassador to Belgium—but its bones were solid. There was plenty of cosmetic revamping to be done,
however, and with summer approaching, James dreaded spending the season engulfed in another makeover. Before signing the deed, she recruited a trusted friend, interior designer Karen Quinn, to determine whether a speedy turnaround was feasible. Quinn, who has worked with James on numerous projects, took one look and fell in love, too. “It’s a jewel-box of a house,” she says of the 3,700-squarefoot structure. “We just needed to fit Michele’s life into it, and fast.” Tucked into a hill, the vertical barn lacked a proper entry. The main access to the building was down the service driveway in back and through, of all places, the laundry room. James enlisted landscape designer Jeff Stevens, owner of New Milford’s Meadowbrook Gardens, to devise a whole new approach to the house. Stevens designed an upper driveway that winds down to a romantic pergola. From there, a path of bluestone leads to a welcoming entry forged from what was once a dairy room. His spectacular solution changed the tenor of the place, giving it a warm, hospitable new feel. Quinn moved at breakneck speed to brighten the spring 2017 New England Home Connecticut 85
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