Charlie and Barbara Robinson’s Zest for Landscaping and Life
By Charles Dubow
Photos by Ryan Lavine
In a town full of interesting people, few are more interesting than Charlie and Barbara Robinson. Residents of Washington since 1971, the Robinsons possess an appetite for life, sweat equity, beauty, gardening, family, and fun that makes most of the rest of us seem as though we are barely trying.
Why is that? Where to begin? Let’s take Barbara. A graduate of Yale Law School when relatively few women were earning their J.D.s, she went on to work at white-shoe Manhattan firm Debevoise & Plimpton. She became the first female partner ten years later, while raising two young children and, with Charlie, physically transforming—often by hand and frequently with the help of unsuspecting weekend guests—their once-modest weekend home, Brush Hill, with its wildly overgrown 20-plus acres, into one of the most beautiful and unique properties in Litchfield County. And that’s just the basic outline of her achievements. Along the way she also became the first female president of the New York Bar, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and enjoyed other honors and directorships almost too numerous to mention. She is also a successful author of three books on horticulture. Her latest, an ode to their home and life together, is “Gardening, A Love Story: Creating Brush Hill,” published in 2023.
Charles Raskob Robinson is no less accomplished and every bit as energetic as his wife. The grandson of the builder of the Empire State Building, Charlie was raised in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley, and fell in love early with the outdoors, particularly the water. Already a skilled sailor, he rowed 2,000 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico and later soloed up 4,500 miles of the Amazon—all while still in high school.
After graduation from Haverford College, he earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins, then began a successful two-decade career in M&A at Bankers Trust before quitting to become a highly respected marine and landscape painter, a passion he had nursed for many years.
When he is not painting, he happily works with Barbara—she calls him her “Capability Brown”—to design new gardens, build follies and sheds, lay out walks and paths, devise an ingenious system of waterworks, and generally have a great deal of fun messing about on his backhoe. When these two find time to rest is a mystery.
The home itself, a 1752 Colonial that once belonged to the painter Eric Sloane, has also been the target of the Robinsons’ never-ending enthusiasms. When they bought it, the former saltbox had prehistoric plumbing and heating, and barely enough room to contain their young family. Over the years they modernized (there is a hilarious photograph of Barbara demolishing a broken ceiling while wearing a football helmet), and added onto it without sacrificing the house’s integrity or charm. It is as pure an expression of what two people with the right energy, vision, and love can accomplish as one could ever hope to see. Impressive indeed.
