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"View Slideshow\n\nThe 69 acres of hilly northwestern Connecticut that a Manhattan-based South American diplomat and his wife first beheld some four years ago were wanting in everything but promise. Lackluster though the property looked, at least the town it was in\u2014Roxbury\u2014could lay colorful claim to American history, having spawned three of the fabled Green Mountain Boys: Ethan Allen, Seth Warner and Remember Baker.\n\n\"It took a lot to see the potential,\" the diplomat says. And, surely, a lot more to realize it\u2014today the place is a pastoral daydream, a veritable estate. The ardently labored-over landscape includes languid meadows, glimmering woodland trails, agricultural fields (\"corn or hay, depending\"), herb and flower gardens and a prodigal half mile of river frontage. In an alluvial upheaval half a century ago, the river in question had upped and created a 10-acre island on the property, and the diplomat, when he bought it, built an arched bridge so that his horses and sheep wouldn't have to get their feet wet on their way over to graze.\n\nHe and his wife instantly enlisted in this long-term endeavor their long-time designer, Juan Montoya, who had decorated five residences on three continents for them. The 1805 saltbox that stood on the place failed to pass muster with him: The awkwardly angled wings that had been added on over the years made the house look alarmingly like a scarecrow. \"My clients were thinking of adding even more wings,\" Montoya recalls with a shudder, \"and I thought, That's like throwing good money after bad\u2014throwing good wings after bad.' I beseeched them to not even dream about another wing. And then I dared to go a little further\u2014I told them to pull all the existing wings off and restore the house to its original integrity. And then a little further still\u2014I proposed that they use it as a guesthouse and build themselves a main house from scratch. Happily, they realized I was right.\"\n\nAfter the last wing was torn off and the saltbox was back to square one, Montoya went on triumphantly to reorganize its fenestration and to strip the brown shingles that shrouded its fa\u00E7ade, thereby exposing the palatable white-clapboard horizontal siding. Within, he paneled the living room in pine, installed wainscoting in the library, pulled the plug on rugs (\"I wanted the wide-plank oak floors to read all the way through\"), and scaled the furniture, mainly early American and 19th-century English, to the low-ceilinged farmhouse rooms. \"I played to the cozy,\" he says.\n\nThe owners had meanwhile taken the impressive measure of a number of barns in the area that had been reconstructed by one Edwin Cady. \"He's the barn man,\" the diplomat explains. Cady demurs, \"Just describe me as a master craftsman and master builder, the last of a dying breed,\" and goes on to mention that a certain 18th-century building he dismantled\u2014in New Milford, Connecticut\u2014and later reconstructed\u2014in Roxbury\u2014had played a part in the 1948 Cary Grant/Myrna Loy movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Needless to say, the couple engaged Cady to build them their dream house. \"We never even signed a contract, we simply agreed on a price\u2014it was a handshake,\" the diplomat offers. \"A firm handshake.\"\n\nIt would take not one but two 18th-century upstate New York barns (both already owned by Cady\u2014\"We're like a used-barn lot,\" he quips) to provide the material at hand for the projected 14,000-square-foot structure. Flooring made of pine, cypress and hemlock, and beams that had been hewn massive to handle the punishing snow loads of old-fashioned winters\u2014all these Cady proceeded to disassemble, meticulously label, truck down to Roxbury and put back together piece by piece like a puzzle, adding new energy-efficient windows and all-around reinforcement. Among the building's most unifying elements would be its five floor-to-ceiling fireplaces. They\u2014along with the roughly 60 broad steps that would lead from the guesthouse up a slight acclivity to the barn and meander around it\u2014were all to be of old fieldstone reclaimed from the property and mixed with granite from a local quarry.\n\n\"When it came time for Ed Cady to have a meeting of the minds with our prominent New York designer, he was terrified,\" the diplomat recounts. \"He said, They're usually pretty temperamental.' We told him, Juan is different.' And he proved to be. If I may make an independent, objective comment\u2014they worked wonderfully well together.\" Montoya takes care to add, \"I configured the rooms' final dimensions, working with Ed and,\" he laughs, \"against him.\"\n\nThe spaces are lofty and monumental\u2014the living room 40 by 50 feet, with a 30-foot ceiling; the master bedroom 30 by 25 feet; and onward and upward. The designer and the wife purchased antiques in New York and Connecticut, but owing to the rooms' colossal scale, Montoya had to design much of the furniture himself: club chairs, love seats, chaises longues, sofas (one of them made in pieces and joined on-site), side tables, table lamps, sconces, bookcases, fireplace screens. . . . He even modeled the iron hardware after farm implements, and he embellished the kitchen cabinetry and some of the closet doors throughout with the same graphic X that can be found here and there on the exterior.\n\nThe living room fireplace is a wonder\u2014perhaps the culminating effect in the whole house. \"I didn't want a mantel, because somebody could then go and put an unsightly little object on it,\" Montoya insists. \"I wanted a flat surface, for a clean look.\" The diplomat remarks, \"The combination of the stone and the wood\u2014so much of it, too\u2014and the very great ceiling height\u2014makes a real impact. We call it the Wow Room,' because most people\u2014you know, when they come in, they say, Wow!' \"\n\nIn the dining room, again no rugs. Montoya: \"I try never to use rugs in dining rooms; to me, the food looks better on the table if there's no carpet on the floor.\" The table here\u201419th century, pine\u2014food can't help looking good on.\n\nMontoya designed the four-poster in the master bedroom. \"It's my take on a 17th-century iron canopy bed,\" he says, adding, \"I was counting on the metal enclosure to create a kind of cocoon in the vast room.\" The generous panel of brown-and-off-white-checkerboard fabric that he contrived for the wall behind the bed serves to enhance the screenlike effect. On either side of the fireplace is a Peruvian colonial painting of an archangel. \"It's like living in heaven,\" says the wife, \"when I wake up and see those archangels. Then I turn around, and I see my husband, and then . . . I'm really in heaven. Well, let's say so,\" she laughs.\n\nThe 20-by-30-foot bedroom shared by the couple's seven-year-old twins is, by definition, a double wow. \"I didn't want to do a little girls' room that would be expected\u2014with pinks and things,\" Montoya says. The predominant color is bolsteringly bold\u2014a lipstick red that \"gives a punch amid all that wood and plaster.\" The puppets on the bedside tables are renditions of the girls themselves, he points out, and the contemporary painting above the window a study of twinship (by artist Ana Patricia Palacios, who, he goes on to inform us, is herself a twin).\n\n\"We lived in the guesthouse when we were building the barn, and now the girls like to go back and visit their old playroom,\" the wife confides. \"It's in the attic, so it's fun going up there\u2014looking at all the toys they left behind and remembering the good old days when they were four. And sometimes, also, their 21-year-old big sister is staying down there.\"\n\nAs designer Montoya intuits it, the continuity of atmosphere that distinguishes this place is a product not only of wood and stone and big open flowing spaces but of \"family, family, family.\" A barn, he pronounces, is \"usually cold, it's for animals and hay. And I made it into a warm and comfortable home for people\u2014human beings.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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