“A brick Georgian was never my dream house,” insists the artist Laurie Simmons. In the fall of 2000, when Simmons was given the opportunity to design a house — O.K., a dollhouse — from the ground up, she collaborated with the architect Peter Wheelwright to create a very colorful, almost Modernist abode filled with works of pint-size contemporary art and design. And yet, the first time she walked through the front door of the near-textbook brick Georgian in northwestern Connecticut that she and her husband, the artist Carroll Dunham, eventually came to own, “something came over me,” she recalls. She said to Dunham, “If this house were a man, you’d be toast.”
The house, which was built around the turn of the last century, had been used until recently as the administration building for the Marvelwood School, a private boarding school. An adjacent barn once contained a cafeteria, science labs, music-rehearsal rooms and a half basketball court, where dances were occasionally held.
Initially, Dunham was indeed threatened — by its sheer size. The house, he said, “was completely outside of the scale of my imagination.” But Simmons persisted, digging up every rationale in the book. Finally, she went for the jugular. She told him to think of it as an amazing industrial building, only in the Connecticut countryside — a better deal per square foot than the studio Dunham was renting in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not to mention about five times as much space as they’d ever be able to have in the city. He was sold. “Laurie always saw it more clearly than I did,” concedes Dunham, who now uses the barn as his painting studio. A full basement, which may or may not have once contained a bowling alley, is dedicated to art storage." (bron: T Magazinen, foto: Laurie Simmons)
(bron: gotham-magazine)
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