Santarella Story

Written by

Anastasia Stanmeyer

Photography by

Gregory Cherin

A gingerbread house in Tyringham, Mass., lives on happily ever after

She wanted to uncover a garden that lay dormant and bring it back to full bloom; he wanted to throw himself into restoring a historic home to its former splendor. Denise Hoefer and Dennis Brandmeyer both got what they wanted and then some.

In their four-acre slice of Hop Brook Valley in Tyringham, Massachusetts, Hoefer can spend days in gardens brimming with blossoms and canopied with hundred-year-old locusts and wild clematis, a habitat she shares with plenty of wildlife. And Brandmeyer labors tirelessly to restore this fairy-tale dwelling, fittingly called Santarella, discovering surprises along the way—such as an artist’s etching beneath layers of plywood walls—that make all his efforts worthwhile.

In the five years that they’ve been at it, the couple’s time has been taken up with clearing out the contents of this four-building complex, fixing the most urgent needs, such as leaky ceilings and rotting floors, adding much-needed bathrooms and a new honeymoon suite, and fine-tuning what was already there. At the same time, equal effort has been made to preserve what has made the property unique, from its very humble beginning through its eccentric rebirth, and its multiple metamorphoses over the years.

While thumbing through the back pages of Preservation Magazine one day, Hoefer came across a tiny ad with a photo of an unusual structure. She knew she had seen this place before. In fact, she had driven by it several times in the 1980s when visiting her family in the Berkshires. “I did the same thing that thousands of other people did,” she recalls. She parked on the roadside to take it all in. Consider her among the scores of onlookers, oglers, gawkers, and dreamers enchanted by the studio of the late sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson.

Located on Main Road in Tyringham, this architectural fantasy, aptly nicknamed the Gingerbread House, has cookie-cutter arches and a motley assortment of windows that are large and square or small and curved. There is a steep roof and dripping eaves, and the split-shingled roof, in shades of green, gold, and red, is configured like flurries of fallen leaves, mirroring the rolling Berkshire hills. (This thatched-appearing roof, made of asphalt shingles, weighs an estimated eighty tons.)

The property’s four structures total eight thousand square feet. In addition to the 1880s horse barn turned Gingerbread House, there’s a circa 1750s, four-bedroom Colonial house and a 1900s post-and-beam sickle shed, remodeled by Kitson as another workspace and later made into a cottage. Brandmeyer and Hoefer converted one of the two silos into a honeymoon suite. Throughout the estate’s different incarnations—as artist’s grotto and wildlife oasis, art gallery, museum and lodging, and special-events venue—the exterior’s design and roofline have remained distinctive. “You have to have a lot of energy to keep up with this place,” says Hoefer. “It’s a lifestyle business. It’s like living in art. Everywhere you look is texture and shapes…. It was a very rare opportunity that we couldn’t pass up.”

With Brandmeyer immersed in renovations, Hoefer set out to learn the first names of everyone in the village and the history of the home. Inside her cottage next to the Gingerbread House, she pulls out a scrapbook passed down to her from Gary Davis, the son of one of the previous owners. She thumbs through articles, contained in protective clear plastic, dating back decades. Beside her is a small stack of books on the history of Tyringham, at one time primarily a farm town and home to many who worked in the mills of nearby Lee, Massachustts.

Henry Hudson Kitson came across the old Kopp place, a nondescript, two-century-old barn, through his second wife, whose father, book publisher Benjamin Franklin Hobron, had a summer residence here. American poet and magazine publisher Richard Watson Gilder’s farm adjoined the Kitson property. Mark Twain passed his summers in another neighboring farm, and President Grover Cleveland loved to fish nearby. Kitson called it home for the last thirty years of his life, from 1916 until his death in 1947.

“Kitson was sort of on the fringe of people’s sense of acceptable behavior,” says Cornelia “Nini” Gilder, a member of Tyringham’s historical commission. Born in 1865, the year that the American Civil War ended, and across the Atlantic in Huddersfield, England, Kitson was a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and a contemporary of Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French, who lived nearby in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Kitson spent a summer living in the palace of Bucharest while he sculpted a marble bust of Romania’s Queen Elizabeth, who later knighted him. In America, he derived much of his income from Civil War memorials during a period when sculpting and lifelike statues were incredibly popular. Two of his most well-known sculptures are the Lexington Minuteman and the Puritan Maid at Plymouth.

Kitson set about exchanging new planks of wood for lumber from his neighbor’s old barns, replacing people’s old fences with new ones, and collecting boulders and rocks from their fields to design his home and use in the bases of his sculptures. One boulder pulled out of a river during a bridge construction is part of a memorial that Kitson designed in front of Tyringham’s town hall. Kitson moved a grain silo to the property and built a second one, both for studio space. Planks of varying sizes were nailed at an angle around the sides of the silos; roofs were constructed to rise to sharp peaks; and windows were cut out recklessly, as in the barn. One neighbor asked him what he was going to put in the silos; his reply was “plaster.” “Good thing,” the neighbor was quoted as saying in a local newspaper article. “Grain’d rot in them.”

The home was also designed to attract and shelter wildlife. Kitson created a six-foot-tall barrier of dead pea-brush bound by willow strips between crude posts to stop curious people from peering inside and to provide birds with sanctuary. In his garden, he had a seventy-foot pond with hundreds of goldfish swimming among water lilies. He grew wild thyme, cowslips, and nodding violets along the two winding brooks, along with a patch of heather, red chrysanthemums, blue delphiniums, hepaticas, yellow primroses, hawthorne, blueberries, and sumac. There were birdhouses and birdbaths, apple trees and white birches.

His granddaughter recalls the first of a handful of road trips, at age six, to Papa Kitson’s studio. “It was magical,” says Polly Leland-Mayer. “It was like Cinderella’s cottage.” Inside was just as much of a wonderland as outside. “It was a big, massive open space with large and small statues around,” she recalls. There were plaster statues from the first pouring, and clay ones in the process. Plaster dust and ladders were everywhere.

Her grandfather had long, white hair, and a white mustache and beard, reminisces Leland-Mayer, 79, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Sherborn, Massachusetts. “He wasn’t a climb-on-your-lap, sit-down-and-tell-you-a-story kind of grandfather,” she says, her voice distant, lost in memory. “I never knew anybody who had a soft silk shirt with a soft bow tie. He was different-looking person, and very pleasant and nice to me.”

Neighbors thought he was peculiar at best, however, and perhaps a bit mad. This was a guy who told locals that he believed in fairies. And the tall fence only drew more curiosity. “My mom told me that someone found a tiny pair of rubber boots and a little umbrella under a fern,” muses Maggie Howard, member of the local historical commission. Children would dare each other to go up to the house, ring the door, and then run away, adds local Neil Curtin, now 77.

Kitson worked vigorously until he died, penniless. The fairy tale fell apart, and Santarella (named, incidentally, after a visiting Italian guest who wrote later to Kitson that the place reminded him of a little saint named Santarella), became just another rundown, vacant home, with six thousand dollars owed in back taxes. It was set to be torn down and probably would have been lost for good had it not been for Donald Davis and his wife, Ann, who came under Kitson’s spell and bought Santarella on a whim just months after his death. With no job at the time and no idea what he was going to do with the structure, Davis used their entire savings as a down payment for the $8,500 purchase price, and made the leap from urban life to country dwelling.

A former reporter for the now-defunct Herald Statesman of Yonkers, New York, Davis spent six years renovating and preparing for the opening of one of the first commercial art galleries in the Berkshires in June 1954. He cleared away massive trees and thickly entangled vines that completely hid the home and sculptor’s studio. Inside the house, he painted over the walls, which were blue with occasional gold splotches.

In its heyday as an art gallery, the home was the topic of all types of rumors, including a possible appearance by the Fab Four. In 1964, a local newspaper wrote, “Donald R. Davis, owner of the galleries, revealed today that all day Thursday and Friday he was driven frantic by swarms of girls from Pittsfield [Mass.] who either raced into the place or swamped him with phone calls demanding to see or talk with the Beatles. Davis says he had no idea how the rumor started that the Beatles were there but he says he was very sure they were not—and are not expected.”

In the same year as the Beatles frenzy at Santarella, Willa A. Klein took an afternoon drive with her parents from their holiday cottage in Copake Lake, New York, and came upon the Gingerbread House. “We were fascinated by it,” recalls Klein, then age twenty-two and newly graduated from college. “Who would build such an unusual place, part English cottage and part Gothic Italian villa? It was such a strange venue.”

Inside, the intriguing building was dark and cavernous, and within one room were large paintings of nudes, dramatically lit. They were the work of Czech-American Jan De Ruth, best known for his female figurative paintings and for a portrait of Ethel Kennedy that appeared on the cover of Time in 1969. Klein had never heard of De Ruth—who stayed at Santarella for a period of time, painting models recruited by Ann Davis—but she was drawn to his work and later bought a piece that still hangs in her home on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

For nearly forty years, Santarella remained a popular gallery, until Davis died and his wife sold the estate. After a decade, in 1996, Candace Talbert and Michael Atkins bought the property for $295,000. They wanted a change from their life in Lenox, Massachusetts, and were initially interested in opening a bed and breakfast. The more Atkins explored the site, the more he saw parallels between Santarella and Chesterwood, French’s summer home, which is now a museum. “Chesterwood has a more formal feeling,” he says. “Kitson’s is this rambling, odd conglomeration. I still feel that the right use for this property is a museum [of] the property and the history of that place. That’s what I thought then, and so we opened it up to the public.”

For a few years, he focused on renovating the cottage, clearing out the pond and surrounding area, cutting the brush and making trails, and digging out a stone landscaped area that was concealed by overgrowth. “It was a bit of an archeological site back there,” he says. They put six-foot-high partitions in the main studio that sectioned off displays of the different periods of Kitson and his Santarella, and the back exit led to the pond, trails, and other artists’ sculptures in the gardens. “I got burned out. It was a lot to do,” says the fifty-seven-year-old Atkins, who now lives in Pittsfield. So the estate went back on the market and sold in 2004 for $895,000, to Brandmeyer and Hoefer.

Married for thirty-one years, the couple look like quintessential Californians: a glowing, comfortably fit, statuesque twosome, he with a lock of peppered silver hair swept back from his strong, tan face, she with a more refined but just as wholesome, youthful appearance. They still return to Southern California often, spending three weeks at a time on their thirty-eight-foot live-aboard sailboat, which is docked in Oceanside Harbor. In the Berkshires, their idea of a good time is to kayak in neighboring Otis, Massachusetts, to motorbike on country roads, or simply to enjoy a beer at the end of the day in one of Santarella’s gardens. “We came from a town of 125,000 to a village of a hundred and fifty,” says Hoefer, who is a real estate broker along with her husband. “The locals probably didn’t think that people from California worked this hard.”

Their goal has been to fix Santarella and sell it, or run a business from it, which is what they have been doing; Santarella has become an events venue, having already hosted more than fifty weddings, birthdays, business meetings, and rock ’n’ roll parties, and something of an inn, with the honeymoon suite and Colonial house available for rentals. The place has come a long way from when they first moved in and had to scatter pails throughout the studio to catch rainwater, at one point collecting two hundred gallons per hour during a storm. “It needed a contractor to do the work,” says Brandmeyer. “It was a good matchup for us.”

The couple spent a half million dollars on renovations, doing most of the work themselves. A side room in the studio was once used for storage, and the false floor was rotting and smelling horribly when Brandmeyer and Hoefer took over. Most likely, it was the same room where De Ruth’s paintings were hung. “It was to gag for,” remembers Hoefer, her smile bordering on a grimace. “It used to be the barf room, and now it’s the buffet room. We used to hold our noses and run through there. Let’s just say we addressed all the ‘ick’ factors.”

Brandmeyer did add some new elements to the site, trying to follow in the mode of Kitson’s approach. He made the Gothic entrance to the honeymoon suite in an old silo out of an old barn door. Like Kitson, he improvises, using the top of an old slate pool table for the entry and bathroom door sills, along with the shower and sink countertop. He tossed wooden poles into the pond to soften and bend them in order to make railings along the curved staircase that leads to the second-floor bedroom. An old mason jar his wife found out back fits perfectly over a vent hole in the wall along the stairway. They recruited their two grown children, twenty-six and twenty-eight years old, to help with the renovations when they were around.

The silo was Kitson’s modeling studio, with natural light cascading into the towering structure. “Our goal was to remove all the new stuff, the drywall, plywood, and insulation,” says Brandmeyer. Previous owners used thousands of nails to secure the sand board walls, which had to be broken off in pieces and the nails individually removed. His daughter helped with all of that, and she and her girlfriend wire-brushed the entire surface. The ceiling was removed to reveal exquisite cross-hatching with rough wooden beams in the inner dome.

Brandmeyer uncovered another surprise beneath a wall of the Gingerbread House. Concealed beneath two layers of plywood was a framed etching of a bust of a woman whose edges faded into the wall, creating a ghostly look. It is an exquisite, personal element to the Gingerbread House, now there for visitors to see up close and even to touch. Such discoveries have kept Brandmeyer and Hoefer deeply immersed within the layers of Santarella.

Back outside, Hoefer envisions more open spaces that might provide views of the different gardens, as opposed to what it was before: all tall grasses and vines, pink honeysuckle and hemlocks covered with the invasive Japanese bittersweet. “Every time I see it, I rip it out,” she says. Frustrated that they couldn’t even see the pond in the back, they planted their kayak in the middle and started pulling all the purple loosestrife, another aggressive plant that choked out other plants and animal life there.

“We didn’t know we had goldfish,” says Brandmeyer, who helps his wife in the gardens. “It was still very much a living pond, and the water system came alive. To us, the property is very responsive, and after a decent day’s effort, there’s a visual change.” [NOV/DEC 2009]