Your guide to the heart of Litchfield County:
Discover local stories, hidden gems, and must-know events.

HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’

Litchfield County talents help bring it to life 

By Linda Tuccio-Koonz

The much-anticipated second season of HBO’s historical drama “The Gilded Age” arrives Oct. 29. But did you know three Litchfield County residents, including actors Christine Baranski and Jack Gilpin, are part of what makes it so binge-worthy?

“Gilded Age,” from “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, tells a tale of the clash between old money and new in 1880s New York. Baranski, a “Downton” fan who relishes her role as aristocrat Agnes van Rhijn, says, “I always longed to do a period film.” 

Years ago, after learning Fellowes wanted to dream up an American version of “Downton,” she approached him at an HBO after-party. “We had a great talk about the Drexels, my late husband’s family on his mother’s side. They were prominent in the Gilded Age,” says the Emmy and Tony winner, known recently for TV’s “The Good Fight.” 

Gilpin, who plays Church (the loyal butler of a nouveau riche family, the Russells), enjoys that his character is multilayered. The stage, film, and TV actor (Showtime’s “Billions”) says he was drawn to “Gilded Age” because it takes place during “a fascinating historical period, with a lot of strong parallels to contemporary American society and politics.” 

Wealth inequality is among them, but another involves traffic. That’s where Terryville’s Ken Wood comes in; he’s among the series’ many drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. “It’s New York City in the 1880s when there were no cars—it was all horses and carriages,” says Wood, who has filmed in locations from Troy, N.Y., to Newport, R.I.

Wood, of Wood Acres Farm, drives everything from produce wagons to passenger carriages. “We really don’t get to talk to the major actors because they’re focused on what they’re doing. They know their lines so well, it’s unbelievable.”

Baranski and Gilpin have performed in the same projects before, but they weren’t exactly “together.”

Gilpin explains: “Christine and I were in a movie [“Reversal of Fortune,” about the Claus von Bulow case, in 1990] and I did an episode of ‘The Good Wife’ about ten years ago, and we were in the same evening of one-act plays at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York about 35 years ago, but in none of those were we actually in any scenes together. So ‘The Gilded Age’ is the first time that’s happened (and so far, it was only her storming past me in the front hall of the Russell House).”

So, what can fans expect when the new eight-episode season debuts? Fearsome van Rhijn will still be wearing her beautiful jewel-toned corset dresses, but changes are coming. 

“The character had to start off very rigid since it is her class that is being threatened by the nouveau riche,” Baranski says. “We see her struggle to cope with the changing world and the entrance of her rebellious niece into the family.” 

Gilpin adds, “I can’t share anything about season two, except that I’m absolutely sure you’ll enjoy it at least as much as you did season one.”

By Clementina Verge

Photos by Ryan Lavine

Darin Ronning and Travis Messinger are unafraid of fire. Contrarily, they have used it in the pursuit of beauty for more than a decade, transforming ordinary clay into extraordinary ceramics that enhance aesthetic and ambiance.

Growing up outside Minneapolis, Ronning and Messinger had no industry aspirations or imagined that hobby ceramics classes would culminate in their work gracing celebrity homes and New York restaurants. But somehow, like individual tiles coalescing into a beautiful mosaic, fragments of their lives morphed into Bantam Tileworks.

It began in 1992, when they relocated to New York and opened Pepper Jones, a cafe and shop that sold artisan-crafted ceramics in Lower Manhattan. In 2000, they visited Connecticut for the first time, fell in love with a midcentury house in Morris, and began spending weekends in the Litchfield Hills. Five years later, they became permanent residents, sold the New York business, bought a kiln, and acquired space at the former Switch Factory in Bantam. 

 Inspired by the captivating colorations of Tiffany Studios glass tiles, they experimented with up to 10,000 shades, combining them to generate multi-layered depth to glazes. It’s how Bantam Tileworks and its exclusive, ever-evolving 120-color palette were born.

Seeking more space, in 2007 they moved to 816 Bantam Road and restored an old pharmaceutical building into their studio-showroom. From here, in April 2020, they packaged and shipped 15,000 pounds of handmade tile to London. Floor-to-ceiling tiles radiating elegance in the soaring conservatory of NoMad Hotel mark one of their grandest projects to date.

“Honored and thrilled,” they visited the hotel last spring, acknowledging that seeing their work installed rarely happens because requests from designers often travel to undisclosed locations, from Chicago to Canada and Japan. 

At times, Messinger and Ronning have been astonished to see their creations displayed in design magazines, like the Architectural Digest issue spotlighting Gwneyth Paltrow’s Montecito home. Unknown to them, their serene, pale-green tiles were destined for her luxurious spa. 

Other projects include the four different mosaics inspired by Native American textiles for a 13-foot public fountain in New York City, and the Florida home requiring thousands of tiles—including 3,200 hand-painted with unique dragons and symbols—to recreate a Palais des Papes (France) floor.

Since establishing Bantam Tileworks, Messinger and Ronning have tried “to bring every client’s vision to life.” Their impressive collection of unique designs includes everything from Arabesque tiles featured in Moroccan-inspired showers, to Art Deco-inspired fireplaces and vibrant mandala kitchen backsplashes. Handcrafting each piece allows for limitless shapes, including wave patterns, penny or textured tiles, and metallic or iridescent glazes.

From swimming pool walls, to wall art and tableware readily available in their shop, the process stays true to the long history of tile making: wet clay mined in Sheffield, MA, is wedged, rolled, dried, cut, dried again, fired, glazed, and fired again.

“Whether timeless or trendy, tile offers extensive design opportunities and a glance at history testifies to it being long-lasting,” Messinger reflects. “Tile anchors a space, providing weight and permanence.” —www.bantamtileworks.com

At New Hartford Company Hardenco, Denim is Sacrosanct 

By Wendy Carlson

Photos by Ryan Lavine

Located in a nondescript industrial building off Main Street in New Hartford, Hardenco is making custom jeans the old-fashioned way, stitching together the denim fabric on vintage Singer sewing machines. These handmade jeans do not stretch, nor are they stonewashed, artificially torn, or (God forbid!) sequin-studded. 

If you want “distressed” looking jeans, Hardenco co-owner Luke Davis, 38, says you’re going to have to distress them the old-fashioned way—by putting the wear on them over and over again.

“What we are selling is the beauty of a well-worn garment. We are not trying to artificially create it,” he says.

Hardenco jeans are as close as you can get to the rugged style of the original dungarees Levi Strauss designed in the late 1800s for laborers and workmen who needed clothes that lasted longer. Their popular heavy-weight Proximity line is based on patterns that Davis and his business partner Marshall Deming, 39, first developed more than a decade ago after researching patterns from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Their button-fly jeans are made of unsanforized denim, which loses a significant percentage of its volume when properly shrunk to the correct fit. 

The two first started making jeans in their parents’ garage after graduating from college. In the beginning, they disassembled pairs of vintage Levis to learn how they were constructed. “But for the most part we taught ourselves by trial and error,” says Lucas. 

As avid campers, they noticed how well-made the gear was and they wanted the same type of durability in their jeans. They are purists when it comes to the construction, style, and quality of fabric, even down to how they wear their jeans.

“I’m “anti cuff,” Davis says, referring to the popular folded-up style that leaves a semi-permanent crease on the fabric. “But I have to be careful cause I don’t want to offend people.” In contrast, Deming likes to roll up his jean bottoms rather than cuff them. 

They opened their first shop in an old bicycle plant in Hartford in 2010, and moved their operation to New Hartford in 2015, where their product line includes canvas and flannel work shirts and pants, jackets, workers aprons, hats, totes and coasters. Their customers run the gamut from construction workers to millennials who are looking for sustainably-made alternatives. With a price tag of $285 for canvas pants and $385 for denim jeans, the clothing is an investment. But the company philosophy is to fix rather than replace jeans so they offer unlimited free repairs for the lifetime of the garment.

Kamal Hussein, 32, who makes special trips from Boston for fittings, explains the appeal: “We are all about being green these days so that means reducing what we consume. I tell people I would rather have a couple good pairs of good jeans that I can bring back to repair than jeans that fall apart.”

The design, construction, and patterns are done by both men who work on vintage machines from the ‘40s and ‘50s, which are simpler and easier to fix when they break down. Aside from the shelves of old Singer machines, there are two massive sewing machines salvaged from a battleship.

“It’s been a fun adventure, learning all the skills and how to use the right tools for the job,” says Deming.

“Neither of us knew we were going to end up making clothes when we first started,” adds Davis. 

“It began as a hobby and then we just didn’t stop, so here we are.”

Located at 190 Main St. in New Hartford, Hardenco is open by appointment. They also have a stall at the Brimfield Antique Show. Store hours are posted on their website: hardenco.com

Say Eye Do to Bespoke Glasses 

By Clementina Verge

Passion, tenacity, and resilience fuel everything Brigitte Paulick does, whether she’s completing triathlons, overcoming a near-fatal accident, or spearheading a longstanding company. 

At Friedrich’s Optik in Washington Depot, Paulick is continuing her father’s eyewear legacy because “a pair of luxury glasses will change not only how you see, but how you see yourself.” 

Best known for its handmade buffalo-horn frames, Friedrich’s Optik is anchored in a 200-year tradition of German craftsmanship. Founded in Hamburg by renowned London optician William Campbell, the store was purchased in 1977 by Paulick’s father, Friedrich, who opened another location in Berlin. 

Paulick was four years old when her family moved to the United States. Seizing the opportunity to bring customized eyewear overseas, her father launched a third store in Palm Beach since 1981. 

At 18, she returned to Germany to attend the same optometry school as her father. Upon his retirement, she assumed company leadership from New York, where in 1995, Friedrich established a store still thriving on Park Avenue.

“We’re unlike any other eyewear retailer in the region,” notes Paulick, who expanded into Connecticut in 2020 and can be found working in the atelier where frames undergo a meticulous process of carving, filing, polishing, and engraving. 

“Glasses are an undervalued accessory, but transform your look and mood,” she reflects. “Our lenses are cut in-house by experienced opticians and handcrafted to fit each face and personality. Every pair is like a fingerprint: one of a kind.”

After balancing time between New York, Florida, and Germany, Paulick made Litchfield County home; its trails, preserves, and waters became a training ground as she transformed from novice athlete into seasoned competitor.

In her early 30s, a transatlantic crossing provided opportunities for introspection and…spin classes. Biking progressed from hobby to passion, and in 2009, Paulick signed up for the Harriman Sprint Triathlon, despite a lack of swimming or running experience.

“I was never an athlete in high school nor participated in college sports. I didn’t even own running shoes; never ran a mile. But I didn’t just survive. I thrived,” she recalls about finishing second in her age group. 

Desiring ”to get better, faster, and stronger,” she trained harder. After completing her first Ironman event in 2012, seven more followed, including three world championships. 

From Hawaii to Lake Placid, Mont-Blanc, and her native Hamburg where family cheered on, competition left her “hungry to find new limits, push beyond them, and watch herself grow.”

Then, on a fateful day in June 2019—three weeks before a scheduled return to Ironman Hamburg—Paulick was airlifted to a trauma facility after a vehicle collision gravely injured her while biking along Lake Waramaug. 

Recovered, her athletic pursuits now focus on philanthropy, raising awareness, and funds for causes including disease research.

Passion. Tenacity. Resilience. It’s what Paulick embodies, whether she’s defying personal limits, expanding the family business, or handcrafting eyewear for clients who have watched her grow up or are just discovering Friedrich’s.

“What we do is unique,” she reflects. “It’s a beautiful investment in yourself.” —friedrichsoptik.com

Boy Meets Girl, Boy Makes Candelabra, True Love Follows

By Cynthia Hochswender

Photos by David McCaughan

This is a love story—about home furnishings. The story begins with a courtship gift that grew into a business. The business threatened to break this couple apart (every good love story needs a crisis), but ultimately brought them closer together.

Stacy Kunstel had grown up in Kansas, but moved east to pursue a career as a writer and stylist for magazines. She traveled across America shooting interiors; one of her favorite photographers was Michael Partenio, a native of Danbury. 

Danbury for many people evokes shopping malls and discount stores, but for Partenio it was the location of Candlewood Lake, where he spent his childhood (and adult life) constantly in and around water.

“We call him Dunes because he always has sand in his pockets,” explains Kunstel—who earned the nickname “Duchess” from Partenio’s young sons when she was commuting from New Hampshire to visit her beau in the early days of their relationship. The Duchess of Hampshire is coming to see us, they would say.

Early on, Partenio made a hand-turned wood candelabra for his new love. An interior designer friend saw it, and suggested they take some samples to the gift show in New York City. The candelabra was offered in black, white, and turquoise. A buyer from the Gump’s stores in San Francisco came by, and put in a large order; Barneys New York was another early buyer.

Partenio and Kunstel worked hard and fast to fill the orders, using their living room as a workshop. Their new business, Dunes and Duchess was a success. They rented increasingly large workshop spaces in New Milford and then Danbury. They began traveling to six or seven trade shows a year. They eventually gave up their regular jobs doing editorial work. They were exhausted. They began to quarrel. The business and the relationship almost fell apart.

But then, as happens with couples and businesses that are going to go the distance, they reaffirmed their love for each other and the work they were doing, pulled themselves out of the mud, and got the show back on the road. It’s now been 13 and a half years for this fine romance and these fine home furnishings. The product line has expanded from candelabras and smaller decorative items to lighting, seating, mirrors, and more—especially dining tables and beds, which are their biggest sellers. 

Nearly all the Dunes and Duchess products feature riffs on the turned-wood style of Partenio’s original gift to Kunstel. 

All the products are made in a 15,000-square-foot workshop in New Milford. Although some items are still sold at retail, nearly everything now is “to the trade.” 

The duo no longer needs to travel to trade shows every two months; designers come to New Milford to discuss sizes, shapes, and colors (there are 16 stock lacquer finishes and an infinity of custom colors).

“Our clients love to visit us here,” Kunstel says. “People are blown away when they see how beautiful this area is.”

Partenio and Kunstel are happy to give back to their community; they hire workers who live in the area, and source all their materials as locally as possible. Because, after all, Dunes and Duchess has given them so much of what matters in their lives.

“We like to think of ourselves as the world’s most romantic furniture company,” Kunstel says. “We fell in love and started making things that we love. We want every piece to remind us why we started.” —dunesandduchess.com

Three Couples Continuing Litchfield County’s Creative Legacy 

By Clementina Verge

Photo by Ryan Lavine

Creativity is intertwined in Litchfield County’s history, transcending times and genres. Many have settled here, drawing inspiration from the area’s tranquility while contributing to its artistic legacy. 

Among them are Dani Shapiro and husband Michael Maren, who relocated from Brooklyn two decades ago. Friends took bets on how long they’d last outside an urban environment. 

Instead of rural isolation, Shapiro found inner peace and solitude that served as “a provocation to shape the creative life” she desired.

Pulitzer Prize winners Arthur Miller and Frank McCourt welcomed them to the neighborhood. Literary greats William and Rose Styron welcomed them to dinner. Shapiro remembers conversations with Francine du Plessix Gray, while Maren reminisces about watching movies in a barn with “tremendously inspiring” Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Milos Forman.

Today, neighbors have changed, but camaraderie remains. Lisa Taddeo and Jackson Waite, and Courtney Maum and Diego Ongaro are among the creative couples who gather around the dinner table now.

Between them, accomplishments abound. Shapiro, whose novel Signal Fires is her latest in a long list of best-sellers, is preparing the ninth season of Family Secrets, a podcast series with more than 30 million downloads. She is also developing Signal Fires for television adaptation.

Maren, a journalist who spent 20 years in Africa, is an accomplished screenwriter and director whose latest film “A Little White Lie” was released last year. He is finishing the script for Shapiro’s memoir Inheritance.

A few miles away, Taddeo is the prize-winning author of Ghost Lover and Animal. Her first nonfiction book, Three Women, a New York Times bestseller, is an upcoming television series on Starz. Taddeo and Waite are merging “two utterly different talents” as executive producers while also adapting the book for stage production. 

“People experience things differently,” notes Waite, “and it’s exciting adding women’s voices to various platforms and allowing for a multidimensional immersion into these characters’ lives.” 

The reward is multifaceted, explains Taddeo: creating “robust parts for women” often overlooked by Hollywood after a certain age, while experiencing the synergy of working with her partner. Taddeo is also writing a gothic thriller set in Italy and a nonfiction book about grief; she is actively seeking community input about “stories of deep passion and hope and need after loss.”

A couple of towns away, Maum has authored five books, including Before and After the Book Deal, a publishing guide that Vanity Fair named one of the ten best books for writers, and the memoir The Year of the Horses. The Today Show named it the best read for Mental Health Awareness Month. A horse rider, she is writing the memoir of a Montana cowgirl coping with a traumatic brain injury.

Her French writer/director husband is working on his third feature film—a contemporary western called Gone by Morning that he hopes to shoot in the American West. Ongaro’s last features “about rural working people and the beauty and sometimes hostility of the landscape” were filmed on the Litchfield County border.

“I am inspired daily by the beauty that surrounds us, the bounty of the different seasons, and the variety of people I’m in constant contact with,” remarks Ongaro. “Our friend group is an interesting mix of stone carvers, loggers, conceptual artists, farmers…representing the eclecticism of people this county attracts.” 

And then there is the solitude and slower pace. Relationships are not merely transactional; ideas have time and space to percolate.

“There’s an amazing sense of tradition here,” Shapiro muses about the place where she and her friends balance life, love, and work in the footsteps of literary legends of the past. 

Alexander Calder: Dynamic in Life and Art

By Clementina Verge

Among the most prolific 20th century artists, Alexander “Sandy” Calder created kinetic sculptures—mobiles featuring wire-connected forms that dazzle in midair—that have attracted worldwide acclaim. Most were made in Roxbury: Calder was among the first artists to arrive in 1933, seeking tranquility and privacy from increasingly-bustling cities like New York and Paris. 

The Painter Hill Road farmhouse became a cultural and social hub for avant-garde ideas and lavish parties that included neighbors Hart Crane and Arthur Miller. 

Most important, the home—now owned by the Calder Foundation—provided space for creative endeavors. In a studio he converted from an ice house, and later, in a larger one he built on the foundation of an old dairy barn, Calder worked tirelessly for more than four decades.

“He had the work ethic of a blue-collar steel worker—his hands were like rocks to prove it,” reminisces renowned Bantam potter Guy Wolff, whose connection to Calder was lifelong.

In 1953, while Calder and his wife Louisa spent a year in Provence, close friend Robert Jay Wolff and his pregnant wife were chosen to enjoy an extended country stay. 

“I was almost born in the Calder house,” laughs Wolff, who acquired fond childhood memories in the “happy and tremendously beautiful” home “filled with music [and] dancing.”

Born in 1898 in Philadelphia—where a full-scale space dedicated to him is scheduled to open in 2025—Calder studied painting in New York City; later, in Paris, he instituted his radical Cirque Calder, an acclaimed one-man performance simulating a complete circus show. 

“He would be on his knees, doing manipulations and yelling in French in his raspy voice, pretending to be a ringmaster. Louisa played the accordion,” Wolff reminisces. “It was fantastic. It was special. He was special. He never stopped.”

The same circus-theme initially captivated notable sculptor and art professor Mark Mennin. 

“I was spoon-fed art history growing up in New York with two creative parents,” remembers Mennin, who resides and sculpts granite architectural works in Bethlehem. “Calder’s Circus was front and center at the Whitney [Museum of American Art], so that’s tattooed in the psyche as much as any of his works.”

Then eight-year-old Mennin was equally struck by the drama and the “defiance of gravity.”

With his ingenuity, Calder “changed the rules of what sculpture is/can be as early as the 1920s…[which] led him to real serious vanguard public art,” Mennin remarks.

Upon his death in 1976, Calder left more than 22,000 pieces in various mediums, including jewelry and impressive stabiles; the 50-foot Stegosaurus in Hartford is among the grandest, along with La Grande Vitesse, which Mennin recently admired in Michigan. 

“It’s brilliantly sited,” he notes. “It’s participatory and interactive. You can walk in and out of it; there’s architectural logic to the procession through it and its scale is heroic.”

Ultimately, almost 47 years after his death, Calder’s legacy surpasses the tangible. 

“Life in France and early exposure to surrealists reinforced his tendency to be a bricoleur, to get rid of the high drama of the academic figure,” Mennin explains. “He became a courier between European and American ideas and ideals, and inspires one to strive for a completeness in accomplishments over time.” 

Though Mennin’s works “are bound to the earth by gravity” and Wolff creates mostly clay pottery, Calder’s integrity and passion impacted both.

“The people who find their truth and live it for a lifetime are most inspiring,” Wolff reflects. “There are those whose light doesn’t fade, but in fact gets brighter. Sandy was like that. Very much non-self-assuming, he just got bigger and bigger, and was an exceptional, generous human being.” —calder.org

Workstead is a multidisciplinary studio celebrated by the AD100 as a global leader in design. From their Brooklyn office, more than 15 professionals create one-of-a-kind buildings and interiors that are comprehensive in vision and exacting in detail. Their Salisbury-based lighting studio is trusted by consumers and designers as a source of evocative luminaires, crafted in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Both of Workstead’s design practices are dedicated to breaking new creative ground with meticulous execution. Robert Highsmith, co-founder of Workstead, shares about his rather new life in Litchfield County.

In the Winter of 2020, we were introduced to the storied Buckley House on Main Street in Salisbury while looking to move to the area from nearby Columbia County with our family (Stefanie, my wife and business partner, and our two five-year-old identical twin girls Ellsworth and Holland). Having grown up in the American South, and Stefanie in Switzerland and the northeast, we were both craving a sense of community that felt lost after years of moving from Manhattan, to Brooklyn, to Charleston—having ultimately settled in our long-time (but tiny) weekend home in Gallatin, New York when we had the twins. It didn’t take long to fall for the lichen-covered stone walls of Salisbury—the towns’ hiking, swimming, good schools (and coffee), and essential New England architecture spoke to us.

Having lived in town for almost four years now, we’ve settled into our new routines with the girls in school for the first time this fall, and both of our design businesses are thriving. The Buildings & Interiors Studio is still based in Brooklyn and helmed by our partner Ryan Mahoney, and the Products Studio is now based in a renovated barn on our property in Salisbury, with the support of a production facility in Virginia. From Salisbury, we are gearing up for the next decade of work but in the context of our new-found sense of place. With me in the 19th-century hayloft barn, and Stefanie in the 18th-century Carriage House, we often joke that we are ‘building a village’ where work and life can coexist with what is most essential about all of our lives here—the seasons that are deeply felt—both with our young children, but also with our personal and creative paths. 

The Buckley House sits on a hill above a square, 2.5-acre parcel in the historic district of Salisbury. The house was built in the 18th century by John C. Coffing, one of the leading iron-industry businessmen of the region. While parts of the structure date to the 18th century, the majority of the house was constructed in 1815. We are the fifth family to live here, the previous family (Dana Rohn of Montage Antiques) left an entire file box full of photos and documents that were used to place the home on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. The landscape includes a formal English parterre ‘knot garden’ as well as a wild meadow, a vegetable garden, a 200-foot-long 18th-century stone wall, a small greenhouse, a barn, and a cedar sauna building. To-date, a lot of the tones and materials utilized in our ongoing renovations reflect my own personal vision of ‘folk modernism’ that pervades many of the objects collected in the home to-date—objects that suggest a dialogue between elemental forms and tactile materials—much like the house itself. 

Favorite Hike 
Sages Ravine, as approached from the top of the Taconic Plateau via the Appalachian Trail on the CT/MA state line.
Favorite Swim 
South Pond on Mount Riga in Salisbury 
Coffee & Treats
Sweet William’s in Salisbury 
Cocktails
Ryan Andrade at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury 
For Antiquities 
Michael Trapp in West Cornwall and Sharon 
Montage in Millerton 
For Good New Things 
Plain Goods in New Preston 

Jennifer Terzian Gallery was established in 2021 as a platform to promote the work of emerging and mid-career artists. Their next show, NOWHERE, is a series of paintings, sculptures, and shaped panels by artist Danielle Klebes that feature a disorienting mixture of real and invented scenes. Like Walter Wick’s photographs in the I Spy books, Klebes’s paintings feature elaborately arranged objects with game-like repetition. A wall calendar from January 2023 with a glossy sports car and most days carefully ticked off appears in no less than four individual works. A painting of a salt lamp sitting on some books can be spotted again in a larger work hanging on the wall of a room. The individual objects seem to serve as proof, giving credibility to the invented spaces that they appear in. 

NOWHERE opens October 29 and closes December 2. Terzian Gallery, 3B South Street in Litchfield, just below @ the Corner.