Bunny Williams's Connecticut Garden Now Hosts 17 Birdhouses

By Daniel Okafor

Seventeen birdhouses now stand on posts among the apple trees of Bunny Williams's garden in Falls Village, Connecticut. The AD100 Hall of Famer didn't set out to collect them. The village grew the way real towns do — slowly, and without a master plan.

The hamlet includes a church with a tin roof, a thatched cottage, a pagoda, a red house flying a tiny flag Williams reads as a general store, and a shuttered confection suggesting a Russian dacha. Each is finished on every side, painted, weathered. None has a door you could fit a hand through.

How did the collection start?

The houses accumulated during the years Williams and her husband, antiques dealer John Rosselli, combed fields and fairs for Treillage, their New York shop, which they ran until 2015. The birdhouses gathered on shelves in her barn's hayloft. "When I had two, I didn't know what to do with them," Williams says. "Then all of a sudden there were 10."

So she and Robert Reimer, her head gardener, reclaimed a long-overlooked point of land. They removed invasive species, planted oat grass, bird-friendly scrub, and fruit-bearing pawpaw trees. The posts are tall — "so that you look up at them" — and each wears a metal band to foil climbing squirrels. Then the houses went up.

Folk art, not pedigree

Value had nothing to do with the attraction. "Most of these birdhouses are sort of folk art," Williams says. "They were somebody having fun building an unusual structure." Unknown makers, each with "an eye and a kind of humor," none trying to be perfect. The details prove it: gingerbread scallops on a many-holed high-rise ("somebody had a great time with their little saw"), a weather vane crowning the would-be dacha, and the thatched cottage she prizes because she has never seen another.

What the dealers seldom had was history. Jacob Torkelson filled some of the gap. He is an architectural historian at the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design and one of very few scholars studying these objects. "The period from 1890 to 1930 is really the birdhouse's golden age," Torkelson says. In those decades, government pattern books urged farmers to install birdhouses to cut pesticide use — the birds would eat the insects — while mail-order companies sold them to homeowners as whimsy and garden biodiversity.

Shown photographs, Torkelson traced one of Williams's houses to the catalog page: the six-room Bungalow Martin House sold by the E.F. Hodgson Company, listed from about 1917 until the firm closed in 1944. "Birdhouses are these wonderful mirrors to the human condition," he says. "They tell us the values that we have as a society or as individuals, in our houses, in our gardens."

Who's building the new ones?

Williams isn't finished. Last May, at Trade Secrets, the Litchfield Hills garden fair she cofounded in 2001 to fund a local domestic violence support nonprofit, she stopped at the tent of Jim Sidon. His company, Sparrow 10:29, based outside Atlanta, crafts avian-size replicas of real buildings. Sidon came to the trade after retiring from printing; his first architectural birdhouse, built in 2017, replicated the 1792 Federal-style mansion in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he and his wife rented two rooms as newlyweds.

Sidon recognized, in three of Williams's houses, the hand of his late friend Larry Smith, a North Georgia builder known for metal roofs and rustic details. Williams has commissioned something new from Sidon, though she hasn't decided what. Unlike her anonymous makers, 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."

Upkeep is modest. Every couple of years the houses come down, get a coat of wood preservative, and go back up. Sidon's cedar constructions ask less; his Newburyport replica has stood in his own garden for nearly a decade. "I just hose it off," he says. Torkelson, a preservationist by training, isn't troubled. "These houses were made to be ephemeral," he says. "They weren't made to last forever, and they should absolutely be used."

And the intended residents? Williams suspects the birds prefer the trees, where they carry on, she says, 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. But they like the atmosphere." Sidon would bet the houses fill in winter, songbirds crowding in two and three at a time for warmth. Williams can't say — she has never climbed up to look. "If they are nesting," she says, "I don't want to bother them."

Come bare-leafed winter, the village shows through the branches, unsigned and mostly unoccupied — a hamlet waiting, like all good folk art, for someone to have the fun of it again.