The floors are all siding from a salvaged eighteenth-century Pennsylvania barn, whose boards were systematically laid and rehewn. Up here I'm notorious-I like to prowl the stores, never looking for anything in particular, just looking for stuff that stands out and speaks to me.” There's not enough space left for any more tsatskes.” Tim Macdonald fills in, “While Mary was on location in Richmond for the Lincoln miniseries, she'd bird-dog things down there, and I'd bird-dog up here.” Mary adds, “That's when I was putting stuff in storage, not really knowing exactly where anything was going to go, which I think is probably the best way to buy-just buy it, buy an antique because you love it. “It scares me to think I may be finished someday, it really does, because I'm running out of tabletops.

Shopping for accessories to embellish the house is one of Mary Tyler Moore's abiding pleasures. And yet we retained our original taste in that the English pieces we have are kind of clean-lined like Shaker.” Also, you know, ‘Cotswold’ isn't really the proper setting for Shaker. So we chickened out and we went for a softer look, which encompasses all kinds of periods. And very difficult to accessorize, because that doesn't exist in the Shaker world. So we wanted the Shaker look, but as we began to look at it in the aggregate we began to think it might be very cold.

“Probably not pure Shaker, because you can't find it, and if you can you certainly can't afford it, or you don't want to put that kind of money into furniture. “It started out that we wanted Shaker,” Mary confesses. And everything had to be dogproof-the dogs are allowed up on every piece of furniture in the house.”Ĭomfortable upholstered sofas and chairs are interspersed with heavy low tables, refectory tables and such lucky finds as an Early American all-wood “cheap clock” with its original wood workings and a splendid Shaker armoire. And he had had the country experience-he had just finished a farm for himself.” Macdonald explains, “Mary didn't want anything fancy or formal, just comfortable. “I had worked with Tim before, when he was with Angelo Donghia,” she says, “so that seemed a natural. To decorate her reconfigured house and all the ancillary buildings on the property, Mary brought in New York interior designer Timothy Macdonald. The octagonal shape and bold color dramatize the entrance hall, where 19th-century portraits of two of her ancestors greet visitors. So now we have what I love, which is all kinds of nooks and crannies and low ceilings-and some high ones.” Our push was to develop a style that was so hybrid it would fit into the area without being just that oneliner: ‘Cotswold cottage.’ ” Mary adds, “ ‘Cotswold’ gave us a lot of freedom-we didn't have to stick to any particular design as long as the lines were clean and graceful, we felt we could do whatever we wanted.

The main house, at right, and the poolhouse were designed by architects Debra Wassman and Jonathan Lanman to be 'soft-not assertive-within the landscape,' says Wassman.Ī stucco, stone and clapboard semi-Tudor with an asphalt roof, the house had been optimistically described to Mary by the real estate agent as a “Cotswold cottage.” Says architect Debra Wassman of Trumbull Architects, who, with her partner and husband, Jonathan Lanman, was called in to redo it: “Mary persisted in seeing an idea of ‘Cotswold’ there. Fall is wonderful, but for the peak of leaf changing I've usually been away working,' says Mary Tyler Moore of her country house in upstate New York.

Myary tyler moore