Our Way Home - Reimagining an American Farmhouse

The glorious Connecticut property of Heide Hendricks and Rafe Churchill (of the architecture and interior design firm Hendricks Churchill) illustrates how a late nineteenth-century farmhouse can be adapted for stylish and comfortable twenty-first-century living.

Rafe and Heide discovered their true home in a late 1800s New England farmhouse after a decade of living in Brooklyn, New York. The historic property, Ellsworth, is a showplace for their shared aesthetic and sensibility of designing for real life, and not for formality. At the core is a house of pared-down traditionalism with references to Shaker tranquility, Arts & Crafts practicality, and bohemian chic. Whimsical wallcoverings, striking colors, a mix of contemporary furniture and antiques, exciting works of art, and comfort abound—turning a workaday house from the nineteenth century into a creative laboratory of the twenty-first.

The house and its surroundings—a constant work in pro