Words Anna Godbersen Photography Kate Orne

Published in No 16

If, as some would have it, there are only seven basic plots, a fascinating house must figure in at least half of them — the house as lure, mystery, or trap. The day I visited the supermodel, photographer and creative polymath Guinevere van Seenus at her home in Redding, Connecticut, two fabled houses came up quickly in our conversation. Gatsby’s mansion, apropos the archeological evidence of a tennis court on her property, now reclaimed by woods, but nonetheless whispering of the people who built the place over a hundred years ago as a summer retreat.

Then, as van Seenus described the dilapidated, junk and treasure-filled state of the house when she first saw it, she invoked Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ documentary about the Hamptons mansion where Jackie Kennedy’s cousin and aunt lived in glamorous squalor (headscarves, stray cats). The second owners, from whom van Seenus and her partner, the writer and podcaster Beau Friedlander, bought the Redding house, were a wealthy family who ran their business from home. In the 1960s and ‘70s they made improvements to the place, put in a pool, acquired an airplane and a boat. Then they progressively lost everything.

In recent years, we’ve heard many variations on a particular subgenre of the fascinating house tale: the one where a cosmopolitan creative goes seeking a rural idyll and is smacked by challenges related to plumbing, heating and hostile locals. (“Many people dream of country cottages,” Fay Weldon’s Puffball begins “… the name was Honeycomb Cottage, and Liffey knew she must have it. A trap closed around her.”) In the pandemic era, one hears such stories —Brooklynites in bidding wars over unseen farmhouses, the subsequent acquisition of chicken coops, followed by fox-related chicken fatalities, then a retreat to the city when no contractor can be found to fix a hopeless roof.

This is not that story. For one thing, van Seenus and Friedlander exude an energetic, improvisational preparedness. They are full of knowledge: the correct way to harvest ramps, the bite risk of swimming with bull frogs, the reason not to burn cedar logs indoors (the heavy oils will ruin the flue). The couple are currently relying on a woodstove in the living room to heat the entire house, and as we sat close to its warmth, they explained how to listen for the right rumble within, the rumble that indicated the fire was working like a combustion engine.  

The day I visited, the couple were readying for a pre-Christmas storm (remember the bomb cyclone and the epic haplessness of Southwest? That storm). They were in constant discussion about stocking up — Friedlander was heading out for diesel so the tractor would be operational in case a tree came down. “He likes prepping,” van Seenus explained with knowing patience. “It’s released some weird inner child. Beau was our chimney sweep yesterday. He cleaned the chimney and got all black.”

The couple began looking for a place outside New York before the pandemic. And there was nothing impulsive about the way they chose the Redding house. Van Seenus had at first been drawn to the Hudson Valley, where friends of hers had already relocated. “Then the pandemic hit, and prices went up. Before that, in Connecticut, houses were on the market for two years. All of a sudden you were in a bidding war with everyone. This one kind of sat on the market. It was a real fixer upper.”

“We saw it, I think, three times,” van Seenus recalled. “We were looking at other houses, and I just wasn’t in love with anything. And we came to see this place once again, and I was like, I love it. We were walking around the pool, and it was so rough. But Beau looked at me, and he said, you might be right.” She laughed, added, “I think sometimes he regrets it.”

“I tend to automatically start seeing the potential and probably ignoring some of the reality…” van Seenus said philosophically. “But then you get into it and the reality hits you.”

Van Seenus has had some experience restoring homes. After her first rush of success and fame as a model in the mid-90s, in the moment of the anti-supermodel, she escaped the city for Woodstock. “It was a shock to the system, to be visible so young,” she told me. “I immediately built my dream house. A dream little cabin.” At that age, “you’re just dreaming, you’re not really thinking about the practicality of everything yet.” Now, at forty-six, her attitude is more receptive — she aims to learn the inherent way of the house, work with its natural elements.

What did van Seenus see that other potential buyers did not? “For me, the most important thing in a house is how it sits on the land, and the flow,” she explained, leading me up and down the stairways on either side of the house, showing me how they connect the two floors and a warren of medium sized, light-feeling rooms. The spaces are elegant, without being overly grand, and they retain some of that original hunting lodge vibe — beamed ceilings, crisscross windowpanes.

“With the staircases, the flow sort of circles around everything. That made sense to me. I fell in love with the overgrowth, too. It can feel like you’re being sucked back into nature. And then the pool. It’s just sort of blasted out of the rock, almost falling into the forest.”

Since moving into the house, van Seenus has worked in and with the landscape. A grouping of old windows, erected like installation art for a shoot van Seenus did for W, were still standing when we walked through the property. And her fashion photography and self-portraiture has begun to include a series with body paintings — limbs in striking shades emerging from a field of grass, for instance. She muses about this work — is it about color, or hiding? “My work doesn’t really have fantasy, but there’s an element, a touch of something fantastical. I like to interject something wrong into the landscape.”

As we returned to the kitchen, van Seenus pointed out the position of the house, slightly above the surrounding woods, the special quality that creates. “You are in the trees, but you are still a little bit above. The tree line is right there.” She gestured through the window — the tops of the trees at our eyeline. “Then everything drops down. That does a special thing with the light. You’re not exposed and you’re not down in the dark depths of the woods.”

The process of renovating the house has been a continual adventure — the vision of the house’s potential, meeting with the reality of a hundred years of piecemeal building, rebuilding, and neglect. “The kitchen we had to immediately gut. The pool was just filled with frogs and about four feet of mud. We pulled maybe forty frogs from the pool ourselves and put them in the pond. We couldn’t keep the house warm last winter until we did remediation in the attic. We are, room by room, taking stuff out and insulating.” One of the two basements is yet to be redone. “It’s a black hole. When we moved in, there was a museum of boilers and water heaters down there.”

To hear van Seenus tell it, the challenges are also opportunities. At some point, the previous owners, “couldn’t afford to fix things. It was just layer upon layer of linoleum and wallpaper. But once you strip that back, the original stuff has been left.”

When they began the restoration, van Seenus spent days in the attic. “At first the process was just emptying, emptying, emptying, emptying. Cabinets full of crystal and China. Old Life magazines, Playboys from the 1970s, old wedding dresses, wedding lingerie that still had the tags on.” In some cases, evidence of the past emerged like clues in an Agatha Christie novel. When they took apart the kitchen, they uncovered a piece of cabinet with the words El Dorado. (Or possibly Esmeralda. But let’s go with El Dorado.) “It was spooky,” van Seenus recalled. “Then we found a picture of [the previous owners’] boat and realized it was called the El Dorado. It was actually a chunk of cabinet from the boat, which they lost as they began to run out of money.”

For van Seenus, the renovation has also been about learning the house. An enclosed porch that she had originally envisioned opening to the elements has proved useful as is — it insulates the rest of the house from the worst of the cold and has become van Seenus’s workspace and studio. The sunlight pours in, and she uses it as a set for her self-portraits and other shoots.

The housekeeping has also surfaced evidence of her own creative history. Recently, going through archives that she’d brought to the Redding house from storage, she came across an image she’d torn from a now discarded book — two intwined red bodies, reminiscent of her body painting series. “I probably put it in there twenty-five years ago, and weirdly enough, this is what I’m doing right now. I do find that a lot, where I’ll look back and be like, oh, you were already doing this. You just didn’t really know you were doing it yet. I wonder where it comes from. I’m sure one day I’ll be like, ‘Oh, it was the Smurfs,’” she laughed. “It might be something so stupid. But whatever it was, it affects you as a child and stays with you. For whatever reason, it brings up a memory or an idea or joy.”

In the first days of the new year, van Seenus and I caught up over Zoom. As we talked, the sunshine slowly drained from the room, the planes of her face catching the light in a way that might have interested Vermeer. She spoke of the many projects she wanted to get back to — her jewelry, quilting, painting, but also the various demands of the ongoing renovation. “Life’s list is unending. Some days it feels still like the dream and some days it feels like the ball and chain and then it goes back to being the dream. That’s part of the process.”

As much as the house can be an energy suck, it is also a source of creativity. Van Seenus spoke of the landscape shifting with the time of year, “the different pops of nature that come up. I’ll see baby’s breath, fuchsia coming into bloom, and think, I have to do a body painting picture in there…”

These days, van Seenus still travels internationally, working on both sides of the camera, collaborating with companies like Alexander McQueen and the denim brand Agolde. She does crave that automatic inspiration, the invigoration of arriving in a new place, with new sights and smells, the singular focus of an assignment. But she is finding inspiration at home, too. “I go on walks and every single day is different. The light, the way it hits the leaves, the colors. That keeps me very stimulated. I hope not to get bored of that. Anywhere you go is exciting at first. Then you get used to it, you stop seeing it. Hopefully I will continue seeing it forever.”

More at guineverevanseenus.com

Anna Godbersen is a novelist and regular contributor to Upstate Diary. Kate Orne is the founder and editor of UD.