Warren, 1799
The fieldstone house at the top of Melius Road had stood a century and a half before the painter Cleve Gray came to it. His parents bought him the farm, the 1799 house and its barns, around his thirtieth birthday. He moved in during 1949 and stayed until he died in 2004. Francine du Plessix joined him when they married in April 1957, and for the next forty seven years the two of them worked in separate outbuildings on either side of the driveway.
The barn
The studio came out of a complaint. In 1962 Barnett Newman came up to see the work, looked at the half of a garage Gray had been painting in, and told him it was the wrong room for it. Newman brought in Tony Smith, the sculptor who had trained as an architect, to redraw the old hay barn. What Smith produced ran to about 2,000 square feet, open under the roof, windows down one side. Gray painted on the floor as often as on the wall. Francine took over the garage he had left and wrote in it, including Them, the memoir of her mother and her stepfather that took the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005. The barn and its silo are still standing, with an apartment inside.
The house
Fourteen rooms and 6,844 square feet. Seven bedrooms, five full and two half baths, eight fireplaces, wide board floors under a shake roof on a stone foundation. A beamed living room with a hearth, a dining room with another, a family room with a third, a library, a main floor guest suite with its own fire. One wing holds what was the farm office, vaulted, fireplaced, run now as a bar, with a guest apartment above it on a separate entrance. A restoration begun in 2015 took the kitchen, the baths and the mechanical systems back to new: heat, cooling, electric, plumbing.
The land
A heated gunite pool below the screened porch, a tennis court, a pond, gardens and fruit trees inside stone fencing, a three bedroom guest house, a caretaker apartment over the four bay garage. When the estate last changed hands it was 68.4 acres in two parcels, one of them across the road. It is now four, over 1,200 feet up, on the high ground of Litchfield County.
