Back From the Dark, With a Fairy Godmother’s Help
The reopened Falls Village Inn, which had been dark for several years, in Falls Village, Conn.
By CELIA McGEE
Published: March 31, 2011
FALLS VILLAGE, Conn.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
he decorator Bunny Williams (standing), who donated her services to help redecorate the inn, and Susan Sweetapple, one of the owners.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
A sitting room, off the bedroom, in the inn's blue suite.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
Colin Chambers (wearing glasses), a co-owner, at the inn's bar.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
Bunny Williams's house is within view of the Falls Village Inn.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
The Great Falls, which gave the village its name.
THIS time it could be called an affair with an inn. In 2005 the prominent decorator Bunny Williams published a coffee-table book about the three decades she has spent transforming a decrepit 19th-century manor house she bought in Falls Village, Conn., into a luxuriant estate, with seemingly endless gardens and enough needlepoint and fancifully carved furniture to make Sister Parish, her mentor, proud. She titled it “An Affair With a House.”
But down the town’s main street was another white New England clapboard that Ms. Williams had had her eye on since she first started coming to this tiny village, a bit of a Yankee Brigadoon tucked away from even the modestly beaten paths of Litchfield County. The Falls Village Inn, built in 1834, was in foreclosure, the victim of a series of hospitality missteps in more modern times. Biker bar anyone? How about high-priced German cooking? Still, the sight of it made her think about what fun it would be to be an innkeeper someday.
But Ms. Williams’s husband, John Rosselli, an antiques dealer and home furnishings designer, drew the line there. So when she learned last April that new owners planned to reboot it as smart lodgings, “I walked down, knocked on the door and volunteered my services,” she said. Free of charge: the Bunny Williams panache.
“I had no idea who she was,” said Colin Chambers, an advertising executive who had bought the inn to run with Susan Sweetapple, an executive in the hotel business. While they and family members stripped ugly wallpaper and fantasized about airy rooms full of interesting guests, they had already been visited by countless curiosity seekers from the closely knit community. “And then I Googled her,” Mr. Chambers said. Up popped the Virginia-born Ms. Williams and her successful career spent enlivening the look of old-money opulence with a well-traveled warmth. While she abhorred the horror-movie Victorian phase the inn had last suffered — mud-brown woodwork, overwrought chandeliers and darkly vegetative carpeting — neither did she want “a quaint, overdecorated New England inn,” Ms. Sweetapple recalled.
Since Ms. Williams would be around only on weekends, she enlisted Peter Rich, a former soap-opera writer with a decorating business in the vicinity, and Robin Cockerline, who, with her husband, Allen, produces organic beef on their Whippoorwill Farm and whose eye Ms. Williams had long admired. “Bunny wanted everything to be comfortable and elegant — or, more like comfortable and inviting,” Mr. Rich said. He scoured antiques malls, estate sales and consignment shops, e-mailing Ms. Williams photographs and measurements. As Ms. Cockerline supervised and coordinated the renovation crew, Ms. Williams directed the moving of doors to accommodate king-size beds; leveraged in closets; outfitted new bathrooms; introduced soft, light colors to the walls; and found buys online.
The greatest challenge was “to keep Colin sedated,” said Ms. Sweetapple, as the relatively modest budget was repeatedly stretched. But Mr. Chambers learned to pick his battles. When Ms. Williams voted for a Moroccan table here, a zebra-print slipper chair there, he conceded.
That there was a hunger for “a kind of missing center of town” was more than apparent, said the noted graphic designer William Drenttel, who, with his wife and partner, Jessica Helfand, has a modernist home and studio nearby. But the inn has become something more. Opened in December with four upstairs guest rooms and a dining parlor and a tap room on the first floor (the large dining room bows on Sunday with the inn’s first brunch, and the rambling wraparound porch is scheduled for Memorial Day), it’s a pretty two-hour drive from Manhattan. And it has somehow joined itself seamlessly to the already considerable lures of the region.
Dan Shaw, a Falls Village resident and a founder of the country-news Web siteruralintelligence.com, credits the mix of people who regularly frequent the inn. “You can always walk in and see someone you know,” he said, whether it’s your plumber, your children’s teacher, a writer, an artist or boldface names with country spreads.
The former sad sack of a place (there are also lingering stories of a brothel and ghosts) is an easy stopping-off point amid the area’s nature treks, historic sites, cultural attractions and antiques centers. The Housatonic River, with its kayaking and fly-fishing, runs through town, and the Appalachian Trail winds past the booming Great Falls that gave the village its name and left it with intriguing relics of the 19th-century iron industry they powered.
“You can tell it’s spring when hikers start showing up with their backpacks all aflutter,” Mr. Rich said.
He was speaking on a cold day in late February, when the slate-floored entryway that Ms. Williams has lined with old-fashioned coat hooks to evoke a homey mudroom was more likely to welcome diners fresh from ski-jumping in Salisbury or cross-country snowshoeing. But by 5:30 the Gulotta family of North Canaan was at dinner to celebrate the winning streak of their daughter Haley’s travel basketball team.
Closer to 8:30 the innkeepers were expecting a group hosted by the Tiffany & Company handbag designers Richard Lambertson and John Truex, along with John Robshaw, a textile designer. Before that they had created a separate kids’ table when Darren and Lucinda Winston — they’re transplanted New Yorkers, and he owns a rare-book shop and gallery down the road in Sharon — came in with their children and another family.
OF the inn’s sudden centrality to this scene, Mr. Chambers said with a laugh, “I guess it helps that I had no prior experience.” Ms. Sweetapple, though, whose day job is director of sales for Residence Inn by Marriott, knows what’s what. They quickly hired as their chef Jose Lalvay, formerly of the Hamilton Inn in Millerton, N.Y., to pull off the kind of fine-dining comfort food they envisioned, using as many local sources as possible, like burgers made with Whippoorwill Farm beef. The paintings Ms. Williams selected for the dining room walls are by northwest Connecticut artists represented by the White Gallery in Lakeville.
Mr. Chambers first came to the area to take charge of advertising for Lime Rock Park, a bucolic raceway a few miles away, where Paul Newman was a fixture, the cars are often vintage models worth millions, and the Skip Barber Racing School is one of the biggest draws around. While Ms. Williams hung the parlor with copies of old photographs from the Falls Village historical society, she allowed Mr. Chambers to decorate the tap room in homage to Lime Rock, and the photographs there illustrate its history.
A more tranquil pastime is the summer-long chamber music festival at nearby Music Mountain, starting in June. Due east, in Norfolk, Conn., across the road from the Yale School of Music’s summertime Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, is Infinity Hall, a newly restored theater that books golden-oldie rockers, folk and country singers and soul balladeers year-round.
Also popular is the Trade Secrets show and sale in May, an annual event focusing on rare plants and garden antiques that Ms. Williams helped start to benefit Women’s Support Services of Northwest Connecticut. Martha Stewart tends to be an early bird.
Don’t tell Mr. Rosselli, but all this activity may have given Ms. Williams an idea. In New York they own the garden-inflected decorative shop Treillage. “With the inn, Falls Village has really become a destination,” she said. “Treillage North? You never know.”
FALLS VILLAGE, Conn.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
he decorator Bunny Williams (standing), who donated her services to help redecorate the inn, and Susan Sweetapple, one of the owners.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
A sitting room, off the bedroom, in the inn's blue suite.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
Colin Chambers (wearing glasses), a co-owner, at the inn's bar.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
Bunny Williams's house is within view of the Falls Village Inn.
Jennifer May for The New York Times
The Great Falls, which gave the village its name.
THIS time it could be called an affair with an inn. In 2005 the prominent decorator Bunny Williams published a coffee-table book about the three decades she has spent transforming a decrepit 19th-century manor house she bought in Falls Village, Conn., into a luxuriant estate, with seemingly endless gardens and enough needlepoint and fancifully carved furniture to make Sister Parish, her mentor, proud. She titled it “An Affair With a House.”
But down the town’s main street was another white New England clapboard that Ms. Williams had had her eye on since she first started coming to this tiny village, a bit of a Yankee Brigadoon tucked away from even the modestly beaten paths of Litchfield County. The Falls Village Inn, built in 1834, was in foreclosure, the victim of a series of hospitality missteps in more modern times. Biker bar anyone? How about high-priced German cooking? Still, the sight of it made her think about what fun it would be to be an innkeeper someday.
But Ms. Williams’s husband, John Rosselli, an antiques dealer and home furnishings designer, drew the line there. So when she learned last April that new owners planned to reboot it as smart lodgings, “I walked down, knocked on the door and volunteered my services,” she said. Free of charge: the Bunny Williams panache.
“I had no idea who she was,” said Colin Chambers, an advertising executive who had bought the inn to run with Susan Sweetapple, an executive in the hotel business. While they and family members stripped ugly wallpaper and fantasized about airy rooms full of interesting guests, they had already been visited by countless curiosity seekers from the closely knit community. “And then I Googled her,” Mr. Chambers said. Up popped the Virginia-born Ms. Williams and her successful career spent enlivening the look of old-money opulence with a well-traveled warmth. While she abhorred the horror-movie Victorian phase the inn had last suffered — mud-brown woodwork, overwrought chandeliers and darkly vegetative carpeting — neither did she want “a quaint, overdecorated New England inn,” Ms. Sweetapple recalled.
Since Ms. Williams would be around only on weekends, she enlisted Peter Rich, a former soap-opera writer with a decorating business in the vicinity, and Robin Cockerline, who, with her husband, Allen, produces organic beef on their Whippoorwill Farm and whose eye Ms. Williams had long admired. “Bunny wanted everything to be comfortable and elegant — or, more like comfortable and inviting,” Mr. Rich said. He scoured antiques malls, estate sales and consignment shops, e-mailing Ms. Williams photographs and measurements. As Ms. Cockerline supervised and coordinated the renovation crew, Ms. Williams directed the moving of doors to accommodate king-size beds; leveraged in closets; outfitted new bathrooms; introduced soft, light colors to the walls; and found buys online.
The greatest challenge was “to keep Colin sedated,” said Ms. Sweetapple, as the relatively modest budget was repeatedly stretched. But Mr. Chambers learned to pick his battles. When Ms. Williams voted for a Moroccan table here, a zebra-print slipper chair there, he conceded.
That there was a hunger for “a kind of missing center of town” was more than apparent, said the noted graphic designer William Drenttel, who, with his wife and partner, Jessica Helfand, has a modernist home and studio nearby. But the inn has become something more. Opened in December with four upstairs guest rooms and a dining parlor and a tap room on the first floor (the large dining room bows on Sunday with the inn’s first brunch, and the rambling wraparound porch is scheduled for Memorial Day), it’s a pretty two-hour drive from Manhattan. And it has somehow joined itself seamlessly to the already considerable lures of the region.
Dan Shaw, a Falls Village resident and a founder of the country-news Web siteruralintelligence.com, credits the mix of people who regularly frequent the inn. “You can always walk in and see someone you know,” he said, whether it’s your plumber, your children’s teacher, a writer, an artist or boldface names with country spreads.
The former sad sack of a place (there are also lingering stories of a brothel and ghosts) is an easy stopping-off point amid the area’s nature treks, historic sites, cultural attractions and antiques centers. The Housatonic River, with its kayaking and fly-fishing, runs through town, and the Appalachian Trail winds past the booming Great Falls that gave the village its name and left it with intriguing relics of the 19th-century iron industry they powered.
“You can tell it’s spring when hikers start showing up with their backpacks all aflutter,” Mr. Rich said.
He was speaking on a cold day in late February, when the slate-floored entryway that Ms. Williams has lined with old-fashioned coat hooks to evoke a homey mudroom was more likely to welcome diners fresh from ski-jumping in Salisbury or cross-country snowshoeing. But by 5:30 the Gulotta family of North Canaan was at dinner to celebrate the winning streak of their daughter Haley’s travel basketball team.
Closer to 8:30 the innkeepers were expecting a group hosted by the Tiffany & Company handbag designers Richard Lambertson and John Truex, along with John Robshaw, a textile designer. Before that they had created a separate kids’ table when Darren and Lucinda Winston — they’re transplanted New Yorkers, and he owns a rare-book shop and gallery down the road in Sharon — came in with their children and another family.
OF the inn’s sudden centrality to this scene, Mr. Chambers said with a laugh, “I guess it helps that I had no prior experience.” Ms. Sweetapple, though, whose day job is director of sales for Residence Inn by Marriott, knows what’s what. They quickly hired as their chef Jose Lalvay, formerly of the Hamilton Inn in Millerton, N.Y., to pull off the kind of fine-dining comfort food they envisioned, using as many local sources as possible, like burgers made with Whippoorwill Farm beef. The paintings Ms. Williams selected for the dining room walls are by northwest Connecticut artists represented by the White Gallery in Lakeville.
Mr. Chambers first came to the area to take charge of advertising for Lime Rock Park, a bucolic raceway a few miles away, where Paul Newman was a fixture, the cars are often vintage models worth millions, and the Skip Barber Racing School is one of the biggest draws around. While Ms. Williams hung the parlor with copies of old photographs from the Falls Village historical society, she allowed Mr. Chambers to decorate the tap room in homage to Lime Rock, and the photographs there illustrate its history.
A more tranquil pastime is the summer-long chamber music festival at nearby Music Mountain, starting in June. Due east, in Norfolk, Conn., across the road from the Yale School of Music’s summertime Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, is Infinity Hall, a newly restored theater that books golden-oldie rockers, folk and country singers and soul balladeers year-round.
Also popular is the Trade Secrets show and sale in May, an annual event focusing on rare plants and garden antiques that Ms. Williams helped start to benefit Women’s Support Services of Northwest Connecticut. Martha Stewart tends to be an early bird.
Don’t tell Mr. Rosselli, but all this activity may have given Ms. Williams an idea. In New York they own the garden-inflected decorative shop Treillage. “With the inn, Falls Village has really become a destination,” she said. “Treillage North? You never know.”
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