Once a Summer Camp, Now a Family Home

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/t-magazine/summer-camp-kent-house-connecticut.html

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SUMMER CAMP HAS lodged itself in the collective American imagination as deeply as corn on the cob and the white picket fence. Close your eyes and you can see it: children cannonballing into a chilly lake, lariats and potholders being loomed, marshmallows toasting in the fire beneath a canopy of pines.

The aesthetic inspirations for the traditional sleepaway, in all its puritanical rigor, were likely the 19th-century ur-WASP family “great camps” — those grand but rustic compounds built by wealthy industrialists in the Adirondacks. But American summer camp as we know it was largely an early 20th-century creation of social reformers concerned about the welfare of middle-class children in the city. After World War I, the cause was taken up by East Coast Jews with roots in Eastern Europe: Borrowing from both Yankee simplicity and the naturalist movement that gave birth to the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, they opened hundreds of camps in wooded lake areas of New England and Pennsylvania. Children could escape places like the Lower East Side and Brooklyn and learn sports and quintessentially American hobbies including archery and horseback riding, thus helping their assimilation. The now wince-inducing Native Americanisms (and, for that matter, ersatz Native Americanisms) that became the overnight camps’ lingua franca — Color War! — were intended to evoke a simpler, more natural time.

Many camp cultists will tell you that the bonding rituals and singalongs of Okeechobee and Minnehaha shaped their character, but their experiences were also defined, if more subtly, by the radically pared-down structures and their barely furnished interiors, sited to take advantage of the waterside and the woods. The minimalist camps were neither unimaginative nor merely austere: Instead, they symbolized an earlier America of slow and humble pleasures, where a preindustrial, even feral, childhood was still attainable. Uninsulated cabins, called bunks, made of two-by-fours, sometimes without electricity or indoor plumbing, ringed a central wash house. The dining hall, where “bug juice” — watered-down Kool-Aid — flowed, was cavernous and dark, with raw wooden struts. Ramshackle outbuildings often were lovingly referred to as shacks — the art shack, the nature shack — itself sometimes a generous characterization.

The dream of resurrecting such simple summer pleasures is precisely what attracted Bruce Schnitzer, an erudite Texas-born private-equity investor, now in his 70s, to Camp Kent, a defunct summer camp on 270 acres off the pristine South Spectacle Lake in South Kent, in Litchfield County, Conn., two hours north of New York City. In 1984, recently separated, he had been looking for a modest lake cottage to share with his two young daughters — an occasional summer getaway from their weekend house, a 1754 national historic landmark Georgian colonial in the nearby town of Litchfield. Instead, he fell in love with the sprawling camp, opened in the 1920s as Camp Milford, a getaway for adults that later converted to a children’s camp attended mostly by teenagers from Long Island until it closed in 1982. He convinced a handful of partners to buy the property — which included about 30 tiny, mostly disintegrating bunkhouses and a couple dozen other structures in various stages of decay — with him, but he retained the heart of the camp for himself.

In 1990, after he started dating the Portuguese-born designer Alexandra Champalimaud, known for such hotels as Los Angeles’s Hotel Bel-Air and Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, he brought her to the property. It was both a casual consultation and part of their courtship. “I guess we both knew that if we were on the same track, it would mean something,” she says. “And my first thought was, ‘My God, it has enormous magic.’”

The key was to preserve that magic, says the couple, who married 23 years ago. Thus they have maintained as many of the original quirks as possible — signs painted willy-nilly on walls by campers of yore, an errant fern growing through the foundation, original beams and off-kilter window frames — while also adapting it for their blended family, which comprises four adult children and their spouses, as well as nine grandchildren. Champalimaud is known for intense historical research, channeling a panoply of styles and creating supremely luxurious hotels honed to a fine, modernist edge. So she considers her deep dive into the summer camp vernacular a joyful escape from the compulsion to smooth away rough edges — a chance to embrace imperfection. Her time at Camp Kent may be, she says, among her purest, finest moments. “People don’t realize, but this really is more of the real me,” she says. “I took four teenagers down the Rio Negro in the Amazon as a single mom. I can really rough it. I know it’s not what you’d think, but I find over-the-top, obvious luxury a bit revolting.”

Over the years, the couple has done significant work to the property — foundations dug, buildings razed or moved. And yet, even as you run your hands along the rough, untreated pine walls, it is virtually impossible to parse what has been replaced or reimagined from what is original. “Bruce’s main need was that it not be overdone — or really ‘done’ at all,” says Champalimaud.

THE CENTERPIECE IS the camp’s 100-foot-long barn-style theater, which overlooks the lake. With a 32-foot ceiling, it has two stages and a large stone fireplace. To build a foundation beneath, the couple had to jack it up several feet off the ground. Luckily, unlike the bunks, the structure, which remains uninsulated, had been well made, with an intricately beamed ceiling and smooth, well-worn, slightly uneven oak floors. Huge flags representing the multinational background of the pair’s growing family now hang in a row down the center of the room. (Champalimaud grew up in Portugal, went to school in England and raised her kids in Canada. Her and Schnitzer’s children have spouses from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Norway.) Below are foosball and Ping-Pong tables as well as a curvy multicolor velvet sofa left by the production crew when the house was used as a location for the film “Days and Nights,” a 2014 update of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” From the ceiling of the larger stage hang four enormous candle lanterns made by the florist and event planner Robert Isabell, left over from the couple’s wedding in 1995. Such offbeat, sometimes sentimental details — including a pair of wood cutouts of the wild salmon they caught and released while fly-fishing in Canada or a tubular chair that Schnitzer bought as a young man in the ’70s — reflect the philosophy that guided Champalimaud and Schnitzer when they began to judiciously underdecorate the restored space. “Our ideal wasn’t, ‘Is it beautiful?’” says Champalimaud. “It was, ‘Is it salvageable?'”

The kitchen, located in what was once the theater’s backstage area, is pointedly free of gleaming marble. Instead, there are cabinets painted coral and counters in wood, stainless steel and what Champalimaud calls “some early form of Formica.” Anyone who put sweat equity into the house — which includes many of the couple’s and their children’s friends — was invited to paint their name on the walls, adding to decades of campers’ monikers already there.

For living quarters, they moved one of the still-sound bunks to create an insulated three-bedroom, two-bath wing, which they connected to the theater. Above the original trusses, they added a “sugar house” roof, a raised addition with windows based on the roofs of maple syrup distilling shacks, to let in more light. The décor in these rooms feels native to the place and definitively sparse: a mix of good 18th-century and midcentury antiques and rustic indigenous touches — there’s a pair of red leather Danish Kaare Klint chairs in the master bedroom, but there’s also a bed frame built from still-barked narrow tree branches from the property.

Several other peaked roof outbuildings that once served as the camp’s infirmary, the music room and the boathouse were combined to make a guesthouse 50 yards away. Eventually, this became a country home for one of Schnitzer’s daughters and her family. Champalimaud’s older son, Lopo, has a house up the hill, made of another of the original bunks. (Her younger son, Anthony, runs Troutbeck, the newly opened renovation of a famed 18th-century estate and former inn in nearby Amenia, N.Y., which Champalimaud helped design.)

The couple is known for throwing rowdy parties where a local band plays Grateful Dead covers, though the house has seen more formal moments as well: Lopo was married with a candlelight dinner for 150 in the theater and both of Schnitzer’s daughters, Eliza and Annabel, also celebrated their weddings at Camp Kent. Still, on most summer weekends there is just a jumble of small children and a lot of food. You can hear the sounds of gin rummy echo through the theater and smell corn roasting outside on the grill. Champalimaud dons a wet suit daily — a nook in the theater holds an array of watersport gear for guests, as well Ping-Pong paddles and yoga mats — and pushes off from the T-shaped dock to swim across the lake. “I think of this place as a testimony to the absurdity of the notion that everything has to be embellished,” she says. “People knew that when they built these camps. Making things fancy just gets in the way of a good time.”