During Covid, Schuyler, who is originally from Washington, DC, grew tired of living in Los Angeles. After losing her beloved terrier Tricky, she rolled the dice – ‘I was feeling impulsive,’ she recalls of the time. When she saw the house, it wasn’t love at first sight, but she liked the fact that it was off the road and offered privacy—unusual in this part of downtown Litchfield, which was formally settled in 1720. She moved in with her partner Mark Lazard in 2022, and was joined by Rufus (a Great Poodle). In 2025.
The house, with its 1828 core, has been added to over the years. The result is a series of enclosed rooms; Walking through the house is chaotic enough to feel exciting. Each room is a landscape of fabrics, color, patterns and antiques, cut together by Schuyler’s muddy-meets-vibrant color palette, a style she developed after studying the Pre-Raphaelite. Art As a teenager. ‘My color sense hasn’t changed since I was 17,’ she says. The maze of rooms has proven to be perfect for hosting parties and its ample library of wallpapers, fabrics and samples.
In the original part of the house, a sitting room now known as the ‘chatting room’ perfectly illustrates his use of colour. Browns, oxbloods and navy blues are punched up with dashes of coral, aquamarine and chartreuse. ‘Mark wanted to put a TV in here,’ she recalls. ‘I said absolutely not and when he asked what we were going to use this space for, I told him, “Chatting!”‘ A paisley shawl, one of many collected by his parents, drapes over the rumpled sofa, and a 19th-century portrait of a woman he found at an auction in Maine presides over the conversation.
You enter dining room Turn right to the massive original chimneypiece that serves as the heart of the home. Lined in Schuyler’s small-scale ‘Foley’ wallpaper, the dining room is like stumbling into a 17th-century Dutch domestic scene, aided by the fact that he often drapes the table with rugs. Small scale wallpaper from Robert To Other rooms on the ground floor have been used – a small space Marc named ‘Muse Bouche’. It serves as a library, record room and curio cabinet, and is where Schuyler writes her thank-you notes.
