Step Inside a Cozy Connecticut Home by AD100 Designer Stephen Sills
Navigating a patch of delphiniums that she grew from seed in her Connecticut garden, Lauren Dupont is in her element. “I just joined a garden club, which sounds so weird, but I’m into it,” she confides, cradling a bread-plate-sized Royal Wedding poppy in her hand. “You kind of nerd out on the facts—the Latin names—and why things don’t work.”
Though by the looks of the current setting, the cutting garden below a redbrick Georgian house— her “happy zone”—any failures are rather outnumbered. Dupont, a pillar of New York fashion and media circles, and her husband, the multimedia artist Richard Dupont, purchased the circa 1930s residence on the hairline cusp of the pandemic. With older children (a son, 14, and two daughters, 20 and 23) and suddenly more time on her hands, Lauren enrolled in online horticulture classes, soon breathing new life into the existing landscape. “I have always wanted a garden,” she says. “Like Richard’s an artist, this is sort of my painting.”
The couple brought the same imaginative fervor to the interiors of their new home, working hand in glove with a longtime friend, AD100 designer Stephen Sills, who had helped them decorate their prior Manhattan apartments. “We had no mood boards,” Lauren says of the “kind of English and cozy” design scheme, which relied heavily on repurposing and recovering existing pieces that the couple had collected through tag sales, auctions, and trips abroad, as well as from their respective families.
“Lauren’s so good with fabrics and combinations—and Richard has so many wonderful pieces he’s created, his art—it was just a joyous thing, sort of a no-brainer,” Sills shares of the three-year-long project. “Her love of patterns and textiles is seen in her wardrobe and her home,” observes another close friend, Aerin Lauder, with whom Lauren works as a creative consultant. “The unexpected mix of colors and patterns creates a warm, beautiful, and inviting space, with whimsical elements of surprise.”
