Summer at Hemlock House
The brook is running cold. The zinnias came back louder than last year. On Sundays the old linens go out on the line — washed in brook water with a lavender soap we found in Quebec — and the forest does something to them in the drying that has no name but that you would recognize.
We've been on the road. Nantucket, Cape Cod, deep into Quebec where the signs change languages and the markets have a different quality of patience. We came home with the car full. We always do.
It started in New York, the way certain lives do — fast, loud, with an eye that got sharp early because it had to. Then Cape Cod for a few years, the beach slowing everything down to the right speed, teaching us that good things surface when you stop rushing them. Then north, into the old growth, into Vermont, into Hemlock House, into the particular silence of a forest that has been here longer than anyone's memory of it.
Somewhere in all of that, Gentlemanly Pursuits began. That was fifteen years ago. Five thousand sales ago.
The instinct has never changed: find the thing made with conviction, kept with care, waiting — in a farmhouse attic, at the back of a market, on a dirt road with no sign — for someone who recognizes it. French porcelain. English textiles. American folk art that was never meant to be art, just someone's finest effort at beauty with what was at hand. Carpets that crossed continents. Paintings loved in rooms we'll never see.
World of Interiors noticed. Elle Décor noticed. Designers, architects, restaurateurs, collectors from across the world found their way here — to a house in the forest, run by two gentlemen with an unreasonable eye and nowhere else they'd rather be. Some of those clients are quite famous. We were raised not to say so.
Everything we find comes home to Hemlock House first. Gets washed. Gets handled the way you'd want your own most beloved things handled. Then it goes to you.
Back at Hemlock House the table is set. Poor Cousin Anatole has claimed the best quilt and is not taking questions. Someone is barefoot in the ferns with a paintbrush. The lavender soap is nearly gone and we're already planning the next trip to get more.
wish you were here.
Joe, Sebastian, and Poor Cousin Anatole
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