The Good Life

The garden at an idyllic weekend home gets the chicest of makeovers

I never thought a garden would be part of my life,’ architect and interior designer Daniel Romualdez says about his weekend home in Connecticut. ‘I have no skills with gardening, no landscape vision,’ he adds modestly. But ten years ago Daniel asked his friend the landscape architect Miranda Brooks to make something of the property around the 18th-century house he had purchased, where he and his husband, Michael Meaghar, planned to spend autumn, winter and early spring. Once the home of fashion great Bill Blass, the fieldstone-and-clapboard house had become shrouded with overgrown rhododendrons, the sky darkened by towering conifers. No design of the outdoors had ever been undertaken. There was no view, no place outside to sit. Miranda changed all that.