Chicken coops plans

Martha in the kitchen she designed and built with her husband, Andy Stewart.

Martha comes by this need to restore and beautify honestly. Ever since she first moved into Turkey Hill in 1972 with her then-husband, Andy Stewart, and their daughter, Alexis, its beautification was her singular aim.

The couple paid only $81,000 for the house, which was in sad disrepair and a state of decay when they bought it.

Built in 1805 by Captain Thorpe, an onion farmer and barge owner of some repute, the house sits on the highest hill in the Greens Farms neighborhood with spectacular views to the south. One can see Long Island Sound on a clear day. As part of Connecticut’s ‘Gold Coast’ the area has become one of the most prestigious in the country, home to numerous celebrities, writers, artists and business moguls.

But when Andy and Martha first glimpsed the property it was in shambles after 167 years of various owners and tenants. It had been rented for 50 years by the previous owners and very little had been done to preserve its historical integrity.

Martha’s sister Kathy describes going to visit Martha and Andy during the first few weeks after they had moved in: “We were going into this house thinking, ‘My God, how are two people and a baby living in this chaos?’ It was just a wreck of a house.”

There was no central heating, just a mish-mash collection of ruinous fireplaces scattered throughout the house. Faulty electricity and primitive plumbing (stone-filled, hand-dug wells) and two acres of overgrown and weedy land were just some of the obstacles that faced the Stewart homesteaders as they embarked on their restoration project.

While various things had been added on to the house by the previous owners very little had been taken away, giving Martha a nearly clean slate upon which to plan the home’s refurbishment; its bones were still intact.

Martha and Andy spent countless hours both indoors and out, hours that scrubbed away years of neglect and replaced it with a personal and visionary style that would later come to embody Martha’s visual underpinnings and trademarks.

Among her additions was a room at the back of the house and a porch at the side, overlooking a new pool she installed and painted black to give it the look of a natural pond. She hired her brother George to convert the barn on the property into a party room for entertaining and to build a second barn on the lot behind the house for a large industrial kitchen (for Martha’s catering gigs) and guest rooms above.