Step Inside a Stone and Shingle Connecticut Cottage

Designer Black and the family rescue dog, Lyia.

Painting the wood paneling brightened the entry hall. Alice Black bought the bodhisattva statue for a client at the Connecticut Antiques Center in Stamford, but then couldn’t bear to part with it. The Harry Bertoia sculpture in the corner is from her childhood home.

The living room occupies the circa-1810 stone section of the house, which was likely an outbuilding for a hunting lodge. Plentiful seating surrounds a coffee table from Lillian August, though Black confides, “When we entertain, people sit on the floor because the sheepskin rug is so soft and inviting.” A resin sculpture by Marianne Lovink stands in the corner.

The sunroom is part of the addition that Black designed in 2007 to replace one built in the 1960s.

The stone turret, modeled after a Dartmouth College fraternity house, was added to the living room in the 1940s. Black and her daughter made the six-canvas artwork.

The cane-back dining room chairs were Black’s first-ever eBay purchase, and the artwork is by Nancy Charak.

Black intentionally skipped installing a tile backsplash: “Part of the reason the kitchen still looks great is because there’s no tile,” she asserts.

Huge windows turned a nondescript back exit into a sunny breakfast nook that features a ceramic garden table with a dragon design.

The laurel branch railings for the primary bedroom’s Juliet balcony were inspired by those in Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden, while ceramic balls from a Copenhagen studio comprise the installation above the bed.

She modified a trefoil-shaped headboard that she had previously designed for a client so it would fit in her daughter’s bedroom. “She picked the fabric and nailheads herself,” Black says.

Black positioned the soaking tub in the main bath so it is visible from the bed.

It was a storybook romance. Alice and Dirk Black fell hard for the stone-and-shingle cottage at the end of a shady lane in Redding. The couple entertained visions of not-so-lazy weekends with paintbrushes and hammers in hand. “The property was overgrown, and the house was in bad shape, but it had tons of charm,” the designer says. “It was exactly the project we were looking for.”

At the time, Black, who now heads Alice Black Interiors in Westport, was working at an architectural firm devoted to classic design principles. “Everything we produced was based on historical precedents,” she says. “This house was the exact opposite; nothing really made sense architecturally, but it was worthy of creating a new history.”

Undaunted, the pair chipped away at improvements, attentive to preserving the cottage’s magical essence. For inspiration, Black referenced the book Storybook Style: America’s Whimsical Homes of the Twenties by Arrol Gellner, as well as the architecture of Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House, a historical stone-and-shingle summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She points to Beauport’s complex rooflines and quirky windows as particularly influential when it came to reworking the back addition. “It has the sense of having been added onto in different time periods, yet feels seamless and intentional,” Black says.

Interior renovations further enhanced the cottage’s quaint character. The Blacks salvaged the floors in the part of the house built in the 1940s (entry, dining room, kitchen), installed moldings copied from a brownstone in New York City that Black had worked on, and replicated the cottage’s original clapboard doors when needed, like in the entry hall. That door closes off a powder room that the Blacks were able to squeeze in. The revision also happened to square off the space. “We were almost creating an architecture that didn’t really exist by embellishing and repeating the positives,” Black says.

The couple played up unexpected moments in the living room, which occupies the circa-1810 stone portion of the cottage. They tucked a banquette into the turret, where their teenage daughter likes to study, and exposed the underside of the loft. “The raw wood beams bring intimacy,” Black notes. The dining room’s eggplant walls do the same. “People don’t want to leave the table after dinner,” she says.

Furnishings infuse a cozy familiarity. In the living room, the sheepskin rug beckons one to stretch out like the reclining woman in the drawing the couple found in the attic. The carved lion’s head entry table, a hand-me-down from a client, has the feel of an old-time family piece, and the hammered-copper farm sink in the kitchen channels country comfort.

Mixing modern with traditional is a guiding principle for the designer. Light-colored upholstery and abstract artwork, from the Harry Bertoia sculpture in the entry to the colorful, oversize canvas in the sunroom that the couple painted à deux when first dating, keep the rooms fresh. The airy white bedrooms are downright serene. “Mixing things makes a home feel relaxed,” Black says. “That’s what the design is all about.”

Interior design: Alice Black, Alice Black Interiors
Builder: Jason Rodgers, J. Rodgers Builders
Landscape design: Wayne Clark, Wayne Clark Landscape Architecture and Environmental Site Planning