Clearing the View

The New York Times
October 20, 2005
Cuttings
Clearing the View
By ANNE RAVER

POTTERSVILLE, N.J.

WHEN Janet Mavec married Wayne Nordberg 10 years ago, she also married a 100-acre farm with a mishmash of buildings, including an early 1800's farmhouse and two post-and-beam barns.

These seemed timeless, unlike the 1940's Sears kit house, with its mildewed rooms that invited demolition. And the 6,000-square-foot contemporary - built by Mr. Nordberg and his wife at the time, Olivia, who died before it was finished - struck her as out of scale. "I hate this house," Ms. Mavec said last month. "But, well, what was I going to do?"

Mr. Nordberg, a partner in a small Manhattan investment firm, agreed that the house had gotten away from him. "It was supposed to be a plain Shaker kind of structure," he said. "But it morphed into a modern design that got a lot bigger and more expensive."

But both loved the land. For Mr. Nordberg, who grew up on a farm 15 miles from here, it had the topography that he had known since childhood. His children, Sam, 29, and Anna, 26, had spent their summers swimming in the spring-fed pond. In winter, they had sledded on the five-acre hayfield that rises beyond the old barns.

"The potential was here to make this place so beautiful," said Ms. Mavec, 49. "But I couldn't figure out how to clean it up. It needed editing."

Then she came upon the book "Mirrors of Paradise: The Gardens of Fernando Caruncho," by Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor (Monacelli, 2000), and it struck her like some kind of oracle. She stared at the book's images of gardens - waves of clipped evergreens, labyrinths, quiet flat pools of water - and saw the answer in this classical love of order. "I wanted someone with a pure sensibility, who would come to this place with an open mind," she said.

So she and Anna accompanied Mr. Nordberg to Spain, where he had business in Madrid. They paid a visit to Mr. Caruncho's home on the outskirts of the city. It was early July 2001, and very hot.

"It felt like 110 degrees," Ms. Mavec said. But Mr. Caruncho's stripped-down, contemporary house, with its colored walls and sculptured evergreens, and reflections of sky in shallow pools, "created this cool quality, a great calm," she said.

The personal chemistry was right too, and Mr. Caruncho visited Bird Haven Farm, as it is called, the next spring.

He said he had a powerful feeling as he approached the old farm. He was struck by the contrast between deep forests and rolling, open fields. "It reminded me of a medieval place, a virgin site where nature is stronger than man," Mr. Caruncho wrote by e-mail. "The forest was amazing, but so were the clear spaces. And it was the clear spaces that I wanted to relate to the architecture."

He connected the whole landscape with the geometry of the circle and the ellipse. First, he envisioned a quiet circular reflecting pool in front of the original stone farmhouse, as a kind of gathering point.

He also imagined two great intersecting circles of the same diameter, one centered on the buildings and orchard, the other marking the hayfield. These great circles would be marked by bollards placed 30 feet apart. In the end, the reflecting pool was built but the intersecting circles were not.

"Both Wayne and I loved the concept, but it was impractical," Ms. Mavec said. For one thing, the bollards would have had to be lifted each time the farmer came to mow.

So Mr. Caruncho reimagined the field as one great ellipse with 900 native trees, just like those in the woods, marking the curves. Ms. Mavec did the math: 900 by $100 trees, and said, "I don't think so." Besides, Mr. Nordberg said, they couldn't give up that much of their hayfield, which is part of an agricultural easement that drastically reduces their taxes.

But they did hire a forester to clear out a 50-foot-wide swath of trees from the edges of the forest. They also removed two hedgerows that had divided the field into three sections.

Now, that elliptical field rises to the north of the farm, with a magical presence. Tempering Mr. Caruncho's bold vision with reality, his American clients have begun to plant native hemlock and pine, as well as some specimen trees like blue Atlas cedar and Serbian spruce, to mark the curves of the ellipse.

Mr. Caruncho had other ideas, like a folly at the top of the field and a massive earth mound, a "kind of dock raised 20 to 25 feet made from compacted soil," as he described it, with a belvedere on top, built on the southwest slope of the property. But Mr. Nordberg and Ms. Mavec would have none of it. This was not the south of France, or even the Hamptons.

"It didn't fit with what we wanted to retain, which was the feeling of the Colonial farm," Mr. Nordberg said. "His concept of the medieval village was brilliant, because it's all about the land, the topography and the buildings."

Aside from its history as a subsistence farm, Bird Haven Farm was once owned by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who carried on the children's literature syndicate started by her father, Edward Stratemeyer. The syndicate used ghostwriters to produce adventure stories like the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Mrs. Adams took a personal interest in Nancy Drew, and wrote many of those mysteries herself. "Her ghost is on the second floor," Ms. Mavec said. "So if you have writer's block, you can go up there and talk to her."


Mrs. Adams built elaborate gardens edged with boxwood on the west side of the house and dug the spring-fed pond, so beautifully sited at the base of the hilly field. She also put together the Sears kit house, and gave the whole place its affectionate name.

But it was Ms. Mavec who asked Manuel Fernandez-Casteleiro, and Jeff Parsons, the New York architects, to design the airy pond house that sits like a dragonfly over the water, and later, the simple guest house that replaced the Sears house. Mr. Fernandez-Casteleiro, who was born in Cuba and educated in Puerto Rico, served as translator for the collaboration. "It has been the first time in my professional career that I have sold a master plan without getting involved in the construction," Mr. Caruncho wrote.

Last month, Mr. Nordberg stood at the top of the field, looking down at a long stone wall that Mr. Caruncho suggested be built as the northern edge of the collection of buildings. "That's the edge of the medieval village," he said.

Behind the wall, a riot of vegetables and flowers spilled over long rectangular beds, edged with little boxwoods; bean vines wound up tall metal trellises. A more formal, more meditative garden of lavender, santolina and sedum bloomed in the old barnyard. These inner gardens, designed by Lisa Stamm, a New York landscape designer, are contained by a curving stone wall designed by her architect husband, Dale Booher.

Beyond those stone walls, the stone farmhouse seemed to float behind a green sea of boxwoods, and the perfectly round reflecting pool glimmered in a courtyard of white gravel. "Now I can't imagine what this village would be without it," Ms. Mavec said as Jewels, her 17-year-old terrier, toddled up for a drink. "It would be so boring."

Now the central courtyard, with its pool and boxwoods, draws attention away from the bulk of the family's main house, which Ms. Mavec finds so hard to love - although she has cleared it of clutter and toned its colors to grays and buffs, so that now the brilliant colors of her cut flowers are the stars of the great, quiet rooms.

The main house is now also balanced by the spare contemporary house that Mr. Fernandez-Casteleiro and Mr. Parsons placed facing the orchard, which seems to bring the trees right up to its floor-to-ceiling windows. Its glass front door is dead center on the wide grassy path that cuts through the center of the grid of two dozen apple trees, all perfectly pruned. "And when you're in the bathtub," Ms. Mavec said, nodding towards the second floor, "you could almost reach out and pick an apple."

Mr. berg's children had a cider party with their friends one recent weekend. Anna stays in the orchard house; Sam sleeps upstairs in the old stone farmhouse. "The place has really come alive again, the way it was when they were growing up," Mr. Nordberg said.

Maybe that's because everything is connected now, by Mr. Caruncho's ancient geometry.