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Inside the Rustic Retreat of Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez

TWENTY years ago, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez met at Life nightclub in Manhattan and discovered that each was on the cusp of studying at Parsons. “I was a big hippie with dreads to here who used to sew my own clothes in high school and went on tour with the Grateful Dead,” remembers McCollough (a glassblower at the time). “He was the total opposite—​a kind of jock from Miami.” Nevertheless, Hernandez was fashion mad too. He idolized Gianni Versace and had once solicited his advice. “If you want to be a designer, you should do it, and you can do it,” Versace told him, an injunction that empowered Hernandez to leave med school to follow his path. (He told his Cuban father that he was going to study architecture, to sweeten the pill.) At Parsons, in preparation for their lives in fashion, Hernandez and McCollough each read Christian Dior’s 1957 autobiography, Dior by Dior, which revealed the story behind the creation and subsequent workings of his legendary couture house. Every season, as the fabled couturier explained, he would retreat to one of his two country homes—a mill near Fontainebleau or a château in Provence—and sketch and sketch and sketch until he had hundreds of ideas for the upcoming collection.

Duly inspired, the couple left school in 2002 to establish their Proenza Schouler brand—and, with Dior as their lodestar, began thinking about an inspirational country house of their own. Their hunt was also a response to their fast-paced Manhattan life. “New York was then just really crazy and hectic,” Hernandez recalls of the days of Bungalow 8 and the Beatrice Inn. “All our friends were going out all the time and were just wild. We were running a business, and we had all these responsibilities, and the weekend became this 24/7 party.”

ABOVE (TOP): A romantic parterre conceived by Miranda Brooks features box hedges planted to match the quatrefoil motifs in the main house’s stencil work (seen on the dining room walls, at right). ABOVE: Hernandez, McCollough, and Moose at work.
ABOVE (TOP): A romantic parterre conceived by Miranda Brooks features box hedges planted to match the quatrefoil motifs in the main house’s stencil work (seen on the dining room walls, at right). ABOVE: Hernandez, McCollough, and Moose at work.
Photographed by Simon Upton

They set about exploring the wilds of the Massachusetts countryside with a friend who’d grown up there and who’d rented a Beetlejuice-esque house. One fine day they picked up a real estate pamphlet in their local grocery store and spotted a tiny black-and-white photograph of a house they deemed to have “the perfect proportions,” McCollough recalls. “We were having a big [Donald] Judd moment at the time, and this looked like a Judd box.”

They went with friends to see what turned out to be a 1792 clapboard farmhouse out of Currier & Ives, on 110 acres in a romantic but forgotten corner of the state. The house was set on a low bluff with views across meadows to woods with a creek, a waterfall, and a swimming hole buried deep within. It had a rich history: Built by the family of one of the patentees of Connecticut named in the royal charter of Charles II, the house, the couple had been told, had been a hiding place for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railway. Their friends, nevertheless, were horrified. “It was kind of falling apart,” Hernandez concedes, but the couple loved such historic details as the hand-​stenciled designs in the dining room, the original plaster walls filled with sheep’s wool for insulation, the wide-plank floorboards, and the “funeral door”—big enough to take a coffin through—in the parlor. “We were seeking something quite authentic,” says Hernandez, “and the bones were original.”

A cabin in the surrounding woods serves as a secondary design space.
A cabin in the surrounding woods serves as a secondary design space.
Photographed by Simon Upton

The house was soon theirs, and Hernandez and McCollough “stripped everything back” to its honest-to-goodness bones. For the gardens, the couple summoned their friend the landscape architect (and Vogue Contributing Editor) Miranda Brooks to bring her holistic vision to the setting. “She understands ‘wild’ like nobody else,” says McCollough, “and we wanted to keep things quite wild up here.”

Trading, in part, an evolving high-style wardrobe for her advice, Brooks decided to take things slowly. The first project was to create privacy from the road with enclosures of tall beech hedges, one of which has an opening that leads to a romantic shaded parterre of box hedges. “I don’t think there’s a dash of color in the whole house,” Brooks points out, referencing the couple’s elegant Nakashima furniture, Tuareg straw and leather floor mats, Beni Ourain black-and-white wool rugs, and midcentury pieces found online or on forays to Hudson, New York, an hour away. Brooks took this palette as her cue for the plantings, with black iris, Queen Anne’s lace, and white hydrangea. The previous owners had discovered an 18th-century fieldstone patio buried beneath an overgrown lawn—a serendipitous find that she was delighted to preserve.

As the front of the house was being embowered, the back of the property was liberated from a shroud of straggly woodland. Five acres were cleared to re-create the original meadows and open up sweeping vistas. Brooks terraced the land to one side of the house to create vegetable and bramble gardens, creating harmonious “levels and planes,” McCollough says. “These little pockets of space,” adds Hernandez.

The house’s spare, midcentury aesthetic is warmed with wool rugs from Beni Ourain.
The house’s spare, midcentury aesthetic is warmed with wool rugs from Beni Ourain.
Photographed by Simon Upton

The house had been the proud possessor of the area’s first ever swimming pool—an electric-blue concrete mid-century job. This was replaced with a dark basin now surrounded by an orchard and wild plantings of oxeye daisies, daylilies, and meadow flowers. In the mown paths through this wilderness, the clover is springy underfoot.

The couple marvel at the garden’s constant evolution. “With a garment,” says Hernandez, “you cut it, and it’s a static composition. But with the garden, things die, things move, things change color, things don’t work, the temperature drops—it’s in flux all the time.” They come for weekends with Moose, the slobbering, sweet-natured Newfoundland who lopes around, as this writer discovered, in a chillingly on-target impersonation of a middling-size black bear. “The minute we get up here on Friday night you feel this instant weight off your shoulders,” says McCollough, “and we are just completely decompressed. Miranda can’t believe that we don’t have curtains in our bedroom even though it faces east for the sunrise—but we sleep right through it.” “We sleep 12-hour nights,” adds Hernandez. “It’s restorative. It’s so intense in the city, and what we do is so intense.”

As they have discovered, their rustic retreat—like Christian Dior’s own country manses—has also proved to be a great source of creative energy. The couple have repurposed a small barn with walls covered in pinboard that now serves as their out-of-town design studio (and if they are feeling more adventurous, there is a cabin in the woods, too). In the buildup to their collections “we’re literally here for maybe nine days sketching 12 hours a day,” says McCollough. “In winter we call it the vortex because we’ll come in here at midday and the sun sets three hours later, so it feels like this eternal night.” “After four or five days,” Hernandez adds, “we get into this zone. You dream about drawing.”

Around the long, dark pool are wild plantings of oxeye daisies, daylilies, and meadow flowers.
Around the long, dark pool are wild plantings of oxeye daisies, daylilies, and meadow flowers.
Photographed by Simon Upton

After a checkered recent history with two different sets of investors, McCollough and Hernandez have recently taken back ownership and control of their brand with a new CEO and a new team. “We’re just rethinking the way we work,” says McCollough. “It’s been cool. The interesting thing, when you own your own business, is that you get pulled in all these different directions.” “At the end of the day, we want to create a business: It’s not an art project,” Hernandez says. “It’s like a whole new chapter. We feel reengaged.

“It feels good to fall back in love with our own company,” he adds, contemplating the thrilling wall of images, fabric treatments—and sketches—in the couple’s countryside design laboratory.

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Originally Appeared on Vogue

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