It’s 8:45 a.m. and a precamp frenzy has taken over Sylvana and Adam Durrett’s country house in Washington, Connecticut. Calls come from the shiplapped mudroom for rackets. The couple’s three kids—Henry, 11, Grace, 9, and Millie, 6—hustle sneakers on, as Sylvana deftly threads Millie’s loose blond locks into a taut ponytail. They hug their mom goodbye in succession like von Trapps in tennis whites, and are bundled out the door and into the family car by Adam. Suddenly, the rambling farmhouse descends into calm.
But not for long. Vogue photographer Norman Jean Roy has just arrived with pastries from his Hudson Valley bakery, Breadfolks, and sets them on the kitchen terrace. In an instant Sylvana yells “Blue!” because the family’s 90-pound yellow Lab has launched himself onto the weathered farm table and, like a breaching whale, sinks his maw into a loaf of sourdough.
Sylvana’s accustomed to this. The 42-year-old CEO of Maisonette, a beloved tyke-targeted online emporium, which itself has made ample use of this 102-acre property for photo shoots, is comfortable in a bit of chaos—having grown up in Los Angeles with her mother’s nine siblings and their families often visiting from San Jose. “It’s never really quiet here,” says Sylvana. “Everything was designed with guests in mind. It’s like a hotel in the summer.” Between the main house, the barn, and guest quarters tucked down by the pond, she can happily accommodate three families—all the kids’ beds have trundles, per their own request—and the Durretts recently purchased a generous six-bedroom gabled farmhouse across the street for further (and future) spillover.
The carousel of guests only adds to the Durretts’ Litchfield County social swirl—populated by full- and fellow part-timers (the Durretts’ home base is in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill). “There was a really fun and embracing community out here,” says Sylvana. “It just felt very relaxed, social without being…I dunno, I don’t want to say something rude about the Hamptons.”
Weekends mean a lunch or dinner party, with Adam manning the Argentinean grill of his beloved outdoor kitchen while Sylvana takes charge of salads loaded with cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden. Grown-ups eat on the porch while children zip across the lawn, from trampoline to pool to the hornbeam-hedged tennis court.
Planning such gatherings for someone who, as Vogue’s director of special projects, orchestrated nine Met Galas is an unfussy science. In winter, Sylvana moves groups larger than 10 to the barn, where a vast white oak trestle table can seat 24, and there’s space to double that. (For her annual Valentine’s Day dinner, she’s brought in circular tables and made room for 60.) The antique working barn’s double-height, cupolaed space can graciously absorb a lot of people: a tartan-upholstered guest room is supplemented by a movie theater-cum-sleepover-room furnished with sectionals on casters where no fewer than 15 boys recently bedded down for Henry’s birthday.
The family first came to this bucolic corner of northwest Connecticut some five years ago, when Edie Parker designer Brett Heyman invited them to stay. That was fall, the area’s most seductive time of year, and the Durretts began house-hunting the same weekend. Of the hilltop property which would eventually become theirs, Sylvana remembers that the early New England saltbox with Georgian detailing lacked a certain “curb appeal,” she says with characteristic pragmatism. “But I had a vision for it.” That vision was in keeping with the property’s history as a 1900s dairy farm (a rundown barn at the road housed cows; the pond served as a watering hole).
The couple enlisted designer Hadley Wiggins to reimagine the interiors with the help of architect Brendan Coburn of the Brooklyn Studio, who handled the renovation of the Durrett’s Cobble Hill brownstone. They also asked Miranda Brooks, landscape designer and Vogue contributing editor, who had helped them with their Brooklyn backyard, to give the landscape a needed narrative direction.