AMERICAN DREAM
Taking more than 40 years, the restoration of this garden in Connecticut has been a labour of love
We started with the aim of not making it too formal,’ says Portuguese-born, New York-based interior designer Alexandra Champalimaud of the elegant but languidly winding garden belonging to the weekend retreat she owns with her Texan financier husband Bruce Schnitzer.
Situated in the heart of the pretty Connecticut town of Litchfield, the 15-acre garden flows from the back of the simple but handsome L-shaped white clapboard house – built in 1753 for the American politician Oliver Wolcott (a signer of the Declaration of Independence) – and across various paved areas that Bruce and Alexandra have created for sitting, eating and garden-gazing. Continuing past a swimming pool and pond, it then meanders gently down, framed by a woodland filled with tall oak, maple, copper beech and shagbark hickory trees, to the Bantam River flowing at the very end. ‘It’s a garden full of adventure,’ enthuses Alexandra.
For more than 40 years, the restoration of both the historically-listed house and garden has been a true labour of love for the couple – first for Bruce, after buying the property in 1978, and then in partnership with Alexandra after they were married 20 years later. ‘When Bruce arrived, there were brambles and poison ivy all the way up to the front door,’ she says. But as he cleared it back, Bruce discovered some gnarly lilac trees, a few ornamental shrubs, trails of mint and rhubarb, and indentations of old flower beds. ‘I realised there must have once been a very good garden here,’ says Bruce.
While not setting out to replicate exactly what had been here before, ‘we did take inspiration from what we imagined might have been a New England version of an English garden back then,’ he says.
This also meant remaining empathetic to its early 18th-century roots (Litchfield was founded in 1719), when ‘this part of the world was once communal grazing land, founded by people who were escaping what they thought was a too formalistic environment in England,’ Bruce explains. Even to this day, throughout town, there are very few fences. ‘Leaving it more natural seemed the right thing to do,’ he says.
Under Alexandra’s keen design eye – she has designed interiors for hotels across the globe, including Raffles Singapore, London’s Claridge’s and The Carlyle in New York – they have flattened sections around the house in a series of barely perceptible terraces, paved with local stone or slabs of granite salvaged from Yale University, which then lead to a long double perennial border. At the end of this, a half-moon mass of lilac frames a 19th-century terracotta figure (a gift to one another on their 10th wedding anniversary), which was salvaged from an early Philadelphia skyscraper.
From early spring to autumn, the double border provides waves of evolving colour and texture every three of four weeks, from a chequerboard array of White Triumphator and Queen of Night tulips to richly hued delphiniums, phlox and peonies. Elsewhere, clever punctuations of unexpected detail – a large, sculptural millstone marking the original working well, an antique chocolate tub used as a fountain – keep the eye moving through from one space to the next. ‘I wanted to create uplifting, special thinking places – places to walk to and find a bench, places to appreciate the intimacy flowers bring,’ says Alexandra. The result is a garden that feels romantic and layered, ‘without trying too hard,’ she says. ‘It was important nothing should jar.’