It all started with a tale of a “womanizing surrealist.”

By David Nash
Photos by Ryan Lavine and Gross & Daley

Published on elledecor.com

Since arriving to New York City in the early 1980s, interior designer Glenn Gissler had his sights set on buying a little place in the country he could escape to on weekends— “somewhere to go barefoot in the grass,” says Gissler who, in 1987, founded his eponymous Manhattan firm after working with internationally acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly.

After a 30-year search, Gissler found the perfect place in 2014: an 1840 Greek Revival farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, set over eight acres of idyllic countryside. As the years went by, he slowly began unraveling the home’s history. He also began spiraling down a fantastical rabbit hole—one that could have easily been illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

It began when a carpenter working on the property told Gissler about a “womanizing surrealist” named David Hare who lived in the home “I’m a student of art history and I had never heard of him, but I just began to scratch the surface when I came up with an image of André Breton and Jacqueline Lamda, with their daughter, and Dolores Vanetti at my front door.”

The photograph picturing Breton (the French writer and surrealism’s principal theorist), Lamda (Breton’s wife and a surrealist painter), and Vanetti (Jean-Paul Sartre’s lover) was just the tip of the iceberg. As Gissler discovered, the 2,600-square-foot farmhouse was a haven for surrealists exiled from Europe during a period of time between 1930 and 1950 when Hare owned the property.

“It became this outrageous epicenter for that creative community,” he explains while listing other luminaries who visited, stayed over, or lived in the house that included Sartre, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollock, and Alexander Calder (who lived just around the corner).

“The people who come here and know a lot about art history, their eyes bug out of their heads wondering how it was possible nobody knew about this before.”

Further research would reveal Hare’s family wasn’t as well known as the DuPonts or Astors, but was equally well-to-do and culturally minded. “It turned out that Hare’s mother was a funder to the Armory Exhibition of 1913; his uncle, Philip L. Goodwin, codesigned the [new] Museum of Modern Art with Edward Durell Stone that opened 1939; and his cousin, artist Kay Sage, was married to Yves Tanguy.”

Its connection to the art and cultural movement aside, Gissler’s four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom retreat from city life was a dream come true. “I’m from Wisconsin, so getting a house from 1840 was a big thrill, and it hadn’t been screwed up over time,” he says, noting that the part of Litchfield County where the home sits hadn’t really prospered beyond the 18th-century. “The good news, for me, was that the town wasn’t developed, and people didn’t spend money to overbuild, renovate, or add on [to their homes].”

Given his longtime involvement with historic preservation, the designer tackled a number of glaring cosmetic issues that included correcting “a lot of wrong paint colors” and refinishing the “icky orange” floors, as well as giving the facade a fresh coat of white paint and a minimalist-inspired update. “Originally there were shutters on the windows which were falling apart, so I removed them; I like the ecclesiastical purity of the Greek temple front without shutters—there’s a sort of Shaker austerity about it.”

On the inside, Gissler has filled the home with things he’s acquired since starting his business 37 years ago, like furnishings by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, a collection of ceramics and metalwork by 19th-century British designer Christopher Dresser, and multiple sets of Russel Wright dinnerware, which are a favorite obsession (“I have piles of them in three different colors so I can host dinners for up to 30!”).

Of course, he’s also paid homage to Hare and the long list of artists who found refuge there by installing surrealist and abstract works by some of the period’s most influential figures.

As for that art historical rabbit hole, he has yet to emerge: “At this point I probably have four or five feet of printed matter on the history of the home. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”