Even though Bennett Leifer had seen this Redding house in person, had walked through its rooms with the Realtor, he needed to experience the dwelling in another way before making up his mind about it. The moment the designer and the broker pulled up to the Colonial-style, 1825 house in the bucolic Connecticut town, Leifer’s first thought was, “Yes, it’s a beautiful, really well-preserved antique house, but that’s just not my house.”
In part, his visceral response was about its large scale—three bedrooms in the main house, another in the adjoining guest house, and a two-story-high rear space that combined living and dining areas. “My double this-is-not-my-house thought happened when I saw that later addition in back and how it just didn’t marry well with the old part of the house,” says the designer, principal of Bennett Leifer Interiors.
And yet, Leifer—who possesses the innate instincts and eye of a designer—remained intrigued, even haunted, in a good way, by what he had seen. “I called the broker and said I wanted to go there by myself and see what that experience of the house would feel like,” he recalls. With phone in hand, Leifer walked himself through, shooting a video room by room. “I wanted to really see how a life would unfold in this house. I needed a vision of how I could live here. I kept watching that video over and over.” Once he saw how he really could be living here, it was, “full steam ahead. I fell in love with the opportunity of what I could do with the house.”
His dog, Norman, found the perfect perch atop a chair in Scalamandré’s Antelope velvet.
At the other end of the great room, a second custom Venice Arte chandelier hangs above a Hutton Collections table and chairs.
A butler’s pantry/bar area links the kitchen to the great room.
The home’s original floorplans hang in the primary bedroom, where a pair of custom Hutton Collections bedside tables and Urban Electric Co. sconces flank the bed, which wears Matouk bedding.
A pastoral scene by Norwalk-based muralist Maya Santangelo lines the stairway walls.
In a guest room, bedside tables from Chelsea Textiles are topped with Vaughan lamps, while a Scalamandré wallpaper furthers a bucolic feel that is fostered throughout the home.
Little Greene’s Capricorn in Portland Stone fills a wall of the kitchen dining area.
The formal living room is furnished with an Edward Fields hand-knotted mohair and silk rug, a Quintus Home cocktail table through Dennis Miller, an A. Rudin sofa, a pair of white-rock crystal lamps from Phoenix Gallery, and vintage chairs from the Gallery at 200 Lex in a Dedar fabric.
Exterior of Bennett Leifer’s home.
An intimate, moody nook is defined by Little Greene Paint & Papers’ Capricorn in Boringdon wallpaper, round tables from Four Hands, a velvet-upholstered banquette from Ballard Designs, all set on an Edward Fields mohair and silk carpet.
The designer transformed a two-story addition into the main living area furnished with a custom Jansen-style settee fronted by a pair of cocktail tables from Global Views and a rug from Patterson Flynn.
While the white-clapboard house has stood prominently in town for centuries, Leifer has infused it with a new and youthful life. One of his well-honed techniques is to “design a space first, then position any existing pieces second.” Adhering to that tenet, few furnishings came from his New York apartment, notably a chair covered in a Scalamandré Antelope velvet, an item he calls “Norman’s chair,” referring to his (adorable) French Bulldog who reclines there often. So inured is Norman to that chair in what now serves as the home’s main living room, that he sits up in the car once he and Bennett and his partner, Rob Spira, approach the house on weekends, as if anticipating that he’ll soon be reclining there in sunlight streaming through clerestory windows.
Although that double-height addition was what least attracted Leifer to the house initially, it has since morphed into the space where he, Spira, Norman and visiting friends spend most of their time. The designer added period-perfect trims and moldings to the room’s many windows for a more formal feeling. “I wanted this room to honestly feel like a hotel lobby, a real meeting place,” he says, citing his affection for the lobby of the former Gramercy Park Hotel. “That hotel had a fabulous glass chandelier and, so, I had a custom chandelier made for this space, with copper fittings and smoked glass, making for a more moody fixture and overall effect.”
For the wall along the home’s main stairway, he commissioned Norwalk-based muralist Maya Santangelo to fashion a scene that, as Leifer describes it, “feathers out into a cloudy sky,” referencing how at ground level her painting reveals a lush landscape that dissipates, becoming more nebulous as one climbs the curving staircase. Meanwhile, in a guest bedroom, Leifer chose a Scalamandré botanical as a way “to make the room feel cozy and comfortable. I really wanted to lean into a bucolic feel,” as if the lush scene experienced on the way up regrows in a bedroom.
With his talent for establishing balance and symmetry, Leifer used two colorways of a botanical wallpaper in two opposing places—a sepia-toned version in the kitchen’s dining area and a vibrant, Technicolor version in a cozy nook of the house, the latter a space so enveloping, magical and evocative that he even hosted a tarot-card reading there for a party.
Soon after moving in, Leifer discovered the house’s original hand-drawn floorplans in the basement. He has since framed them, and they now hang in the primary bedroom. “Seeing those initial plans, I completely understand how we got to where we are with this house,” he says. As he continues to personalize the spaces, imbuing each room with mood and character, the house becomes exactly the right house for him.
