Bunny Williams Never Set Out to Collect Birdhouses—Now a ...

Bunny Williams's Falls Village, Connecticut, garden features 17 unique folk-art birdhouses on tall posts, a whimsical hamlet built one piece at a time.

Falls Village Garden Hosts a Folk-Art Birdhouse Village in Connecticut

Bunny Williams's country garden in Falls Village, Connecticut, has its own village. Tucked at the edge of the apple trees, the AD100 Hall of Famer's birdhouses form a rough hamlet: a church with a sensible tin roof, a thatched cottage, a pagoda, a red house flying a tiny flag that Williams takes for a general store, and a shuttered confection that looks like a Russian dacha. Each one sits on its own post. Each is finished on every side, painted, and weathered like buildings that have stood for generations. Not one has a door you could fit a hand through. These are houses for birds, and they grew the way real towns do, one building at a time, with no master plan.

Image may contain Plant and Vegetation — A farmhouse with a side porch crafted by the late Larry Smith, a North Georgia birdhouse builder known for fashioning charmingly detailed structures with metal roofs.

The collection started as a side effect of a working life. For years, Williams and her husband, the antiques dealer John Rosselli, combed fields and fairs for Treillage, the much-loved shop they ran in New York City until 2015. Birdhouses kept turning up. They piled onto shelves in the hayloft of her barn. "When I had two, I didn't know what to do with them," she says. "Then all of a sudden there were 10." At some point, she decided they'd been in storage long enough.

Building a neighborhood for birds

Williams didn't set out to decorate. She set out to fix a neglected corner. She and Robert Reimer, the head gardener on the property, began by reclaiming a long-overlooked point of land. They removed invasive species to open up space and free a stand of existing apple trees, then planted oat grass, bird-friendly scrub, and fruit-bearing pawpaw trees. Only after that did the houses go up. There are 17 now.

The posts were a deliberate choice. Williams had them made uniform and tall, "so that you look up at them," and each one is wrapped with a metal band. The band is there to stop ambitious squirrels from climbing up and disturbing the tenants she had in mind.

Image may contain Betsy Bloomingdale Person Sitting Plant Tree Adult and Tree Stump — Williams, on a tree stump next to the pagoda. The notch in the base of the birdhouse indicates that it was probably designed to be mounted on a roof.

Folk art, not Monticello in miniature

What hooked her wasn't provenance or prestige. "Most of these birdhouses are sort of folk art," she says. "They were somebody having fun building an unusual structure." These aren't scaled-down copies of famous houses, and they aren't replicas of anyone's own home. They came from unknown makers, each with "an eye and a kind of humor," and none of them trying to be perfect.

That's the appeal, and it's also why they're hard to value. Look closely. There are gingerbread scallops on a many-holed high-rise, which Williams says reflects that "somebody had a great time with their little saw." There's a thatched-roof cottage she prizes because she's never seen another like it. And there's a weather vane crowning the would-be dacha. Nobody was aiming for a museum piece, which is exactly why these pieces feel alive.

Image may contain Architecture Building Tower Wood and Triangle — An A-frame house embellished with gingerbread trim and decorative brackets

Image may contain Architecture Building Housing House Cabin Plant and Vegetation — A church with a brick chimney, an oversized cupola, and Gothic Revival design elements.

Image may contain Plant Vegetation Architecture Building Housing House and Cabin — A country church with a tin roof

A rare combination house and feeder that evokes a neoclassical temple

Image may contain Wood and Mailbox — Williams calls this one the general store.

Image may contain Wood — A colonial revival house with a columned portico built by Larry Smith

Image may contain Wood and Bird Feeder — "It has a kind of Russian dacha feeling," says Williams.

The paper trail is still out there

Here's the problem with buying birdhouses from dealers: they rarely knew where the things came from, and the history didn't come with the sale. It's not clear how many of these makers will ever be identified. But the record isn't gone, and that's the more interesting part.

Jacob Torkelson, an architectural historian and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design, is one of very few scholars in the country studying these objects. He's been working to identify their makers and manufacturers, wherever a name survives. "The period from 1890 to 1930 is really the birdhouse's golden age," he says.

Those decades mattered for practical reasons, not just decorative ones. Government pattern books urged farmers to put up birdhouses to cut pesticide use, since the birds would eat the insects. Mail-order companies sold them to homeowners as pure whimsy, and also as a way to promote biodiversity in the garden. Shown photographs from Williams's collection, Torkelson went further than the dealers could. He traced one house to its catalog page: the six-room Bungalow Martin House, sold by the E.F. Hodgson Company, which listed the model from about 1917 until the firm closed in 1944.

Image may contain Wood Architecture Building Housing House and Cabin — A double porch house also built by Larry Smith

That's the real payoff. A birdhouse that looks like a toy can still tell you what people valued at a given moment. "Birdhouses are these wonderful mirrors to the human condition," Torkelson says. "They tell us the values that we have as a society or as individuals, in our houses, in our gardens." If you're collecting vernacular objects, that's the lesson. The object is a document, and the paperwork is often still out there, waiting for someone to go looking.

Williams still isn't done collecting, and her hunt keeps leading her to the same small community of makers. Last May she stopped at the Trade Secrets garden fair, the Litchfield Hills event she cofounded in 2001 to raise money for a local nonprofit that supports victims of domestic violence. There she found Jim Sidon, whose company, [Sparrow 10:29](https://www.sparrow1029.com/), builds avian-size replicas of real buildings. ![Image may contain Plant Vegetation Land Nature Outdoors Tree Woodland Grass and Grove](/articles/404/aDwuYxC8d6vYuQ7AKlDYiMCYuHP6fH5X.webp) *This pagoda-inspired birdhouse provides multiple roosting spots.* ![Image may contain Plant Vegetation Architecture Building Housing Tree Outdoors House and Nature](/articles/404/YdhDVNN5jATeFgEUi3wm5yQs7DQklBxs.webp) *An unusual thatched-roof cottage prized by Williams, who has never seen another like it.*

From printing press to birdhouse workshop

Sidon didn't start out in birdhouses. He spent his working life in the printing industry, retired, and then took up architectural replicas, based outside Atlanta. His first, built in 2017, copied the 1792 Federal-style mansion in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he and his wife once rented two rooms as newlyweds. That's a personal starting point, and it shows in the work. The most telling detail is what Sidon noticed in Williams's collection. Three of her houses carried the hand of Larry Smith, his late friend and a North Georgia birdhouse builder known for metal roofs and rustic touches. Sidon recognized the work, which says something about how distinctive these makers are. Williams has now asked him for a new house, though she hasn't settled on what she wants. Sidon's approach runs against the grain of the genre. Where Williams's makers stay anonymous, he numbers and signs every house. "My hope is that years from now, someone's searching that out," he says, "and when they open it up, they'll see my signature." Anonymous craftsmanship disappears. Signed work is a bet that someone will care enough to look inside.

Upkeep, and the question of how long these houses should last

![Image may contain Architecture Building and Housing](/articles/404/eDf6sfbgtc1DEJSUvYtQNfWK7SfcscDy.webp) *Drawing the eye like miniature garden follies, the houses rise on poles amid a stand of apple trees from ground planted with oat grass and bird-friendly scrub plants.* Maintenance here is refreshingly low-key. In Falls Village, the routine is to take the houses down every couple of years, coat them with wood preservative, and put them back up to face the weather. Sidon's birdhouses are cedar, sealed against the elements, and they ask for even less. His Newburyport replica has sat in his own garden for nearly a decade without any work at all. "I just hose it off," he says. Not everyone sees that as a shortcoming. Torkelson, a preservationist by training, takes the opposite view from most people in his field. "These houses were made to be ephemeral," he says. "They weren't made to last forever, and they should absolutely be used." For a preservationist, that's a notable concession. He's not treating these objects as relics to freeze in place.

Who's actually moving in

Here's the thing: nobody knows whether the birds want these houses. Williams suspects they don't. She thinks most birds prefer the trees, where they carry on like a symphony orchestra. "I've always felt that one of the reasons they don't live in these houses is the birds think it's suburbia," she says. "But they like the atmosphere." Sidon is more optimistic. He'd bet that when winter strips the woods bare and the village shows through the branches, the houses do get used, with songbirds crowding in two and three at a time for warmth. That's a reasonable guess, but it's still a guess. Williams can't confirm it either. She has never once climbed up to look inside. "If they are nesting," she says, "I don't want to bother them." That's an odd kind of restraint for a collector, and it's probably the right one. These objects were built for birds, and the birds are the ones who get to decide whether they work.

Source: Shax Riegler · www.architecturaldigest.com