Products are independently selected by our editors. We may earn an affiliate commission from links.
On January 20, incoming First Lady Melania Trump wore an Adam Lippes look for the inauguration of her husband, Donald Trump, as the 47th President of the United States. Here, revisit a feature on Lippes’s historic Berkshires estate from the February 2015 issue of Vogue.
When designer Adam Lippes hosted the spring presentation for his two-year-old namesake label at his Greenwich Village duplex, it was hard to know where to focus: on Lippes’s ivory topcoat embellished with knotted silk tassels and his sporty tank evening dress with its intricate plissé skirt—or the elegant arrangement of flowers stretching toward the ceiling and the eclectic display of artworks, including paintings by Robert Motherwell and Milton Avery.
As it turns out, Lippes’s gift for exquisite environments isn’t bound by city limits: Casa Sandra, the 43-year-old designer’s 100-acre Tudor retreat on the Konkapot River in the southern Berkshires, is merely an extension of his warm, refined taste on a profoundly larger scale.
The designer bought the property a decade ago, after the death of his beloved mother (for whom the house is named). Initially resistant to anything in the Berkshires (too far from Manhattan, he thought) and anything Tudor (he never much cared for the style), Lippes nonetheless ended up the fourth owner of a charming four-story converted eighteenth-century barn that once served as a woodcut-printing press. “It just spoke to me,” Lippes says. It’s easy to see why: The cream-and-black structure, with its apple trees in front and sublime rolling hills in back, looks to be straight out of a storybook.
He has since filled both the house and the adjacent pool bungalow (which Lippes designed and built with the help of a contractor) with family heirlooms ranging from the culturally valuable (a mid-century oil painting by Marguerite Zorach that once hung in his parents’ bedroom) to the sentimental (a framed half-sensical note of apology written in careful cursive by a young Lippes to his mom). These are all to be discovered as the house reveals itself in both tiny nooks and larger spaces, including three guest rooms—one finished in Pierre Frey palm-tree fabric and filled with desks and lamps from the Swedish Grace period—and an expansive, steeple-ceilinged attic, which Lippes plans eventually to turn into the master bedroom (until recently, it’s where he kept the suit of armor that came with the house).
Lippes’s father, Gerald, is a lawyer and self-taught art expert who sat on the board of the esteemed Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, where Lippes grew up. And much like his mother’s sense of relaxed polish, his father’s passion for collecting seems to have trickled down to the son. Dash Snow’s Blow, which Lippes picked up at Art Basel Miami Beach, hangs in the living room of the main house along with pieces by his friends Eric Freeman and Joshua Abelow, both former assistants to Ross Bleckner.
If Casa Sandra’s interiors reflect Lippes’s family’s influence, the vast surrounding land is a testament to his mentor, the late Oscar de la Renta, for whom he worked for eight years, ultimately as creative director. “My mom started me off with a sense of style, and Oscar really refined it,” says Lippes. “He always said that the point of every garden is to make rooms.” And so, over the last decade, Lippes has cleared miles of path through the wild grasses and along the shallow swimming holes where his three Labradoodles—Bidu, Lola, and Kiko—frolic. A group of hedges, once it fills in, will enclose a large topiary shaped like a globe. Lippes also placed two carved wooden benches picked up from a local antiques dealer in an open clearing and faced them toward the sunset. “Isn’t it so pretty?” he asks. “I think up here; I work. It’s just so peaceful.”
