Architectural Digest visits Christopher Spitzmiller’s Clove Brook Farm in upstate New York.

Transcript
[Christopher] Hi, I'm Christopher Spitzmiller,
I'm a potter.
I bought the house in October of .
I needed it, I needed it to get away,
you know that house has been there for over years,
and I think I needed to take care of it and needed
the sense of calm that that would give me in turn.
The house was a wreck when I first came to it.
The renovations went on for five years,
I had planned on a three year renovation.
It called to me, there was something in my heart
that said this is the place that you need to be,
the location was right and the bones were there.
Albert Hadley was a big design inspiration,
and friend of mine for a long, long time.
With me, I think that the biggest force of him
that's in there is the editing, it's what's not
in those rooms, it's the discipline of saying
I only need three objects here.
It's very pastoral up there,
it had been a cow farm for a lot of years.
You hear the clove brooks gurgling away,
you hear the chickens.
I have probably between and chickens
at any given moment, at night one of my favorite sounds
in the spring is when the peepers
start to come on.
For me, the life on the weekends is a lot about gardening
and spending time outside or being with my chickens.
My garden is a collaboration between myself
and P. Allen Smith, he designed it and did the layout
of it and showed me what to plant where, and I implemented
the different plants that he gave me.
Comfort, I think, makes the country house experience great.
I think you've gotta have good sofas, you've gotta have
good places to sit, you've gotta have fun things to read,
activities for people to do.
Up there, I've got a real kitchen, I have space,
I have a lot of luxury that is just not afforded
to me in the city, and I think that my heart
is really in that house up there.

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