Bunny Williams Never Set Out to Collect Birdhouses—Now a Whole Village of Them Stands in Her Connecticut Garden

“When I had two, I didn’t know what to do with them,” the legendary designer says. “Then all of a sudden there were 10.”AD100 Hall of Fame designer Bunny Williams wanders in the birdhouse village she created amid a stand of apple trees in a reclaimed area of her Connecticut property.Among the apple trees at the edge of AD100 Hall of Famer Bunny Williams’s storied country garden in Falls Village, Connecticut, stands a church with a sensible tin roof; a thatched cottage; a pagoda; a red house flying a tiny flag that she takes for a general store; and a shuttered confection that suggests a Russian dacha. Each is raised high on its own post, finished on every side, painted and weathered like the structures of a settled town—and none has a door you could fit a hand through. It is a hamlet fashioned for birds, assembled building by building, the way real towns often grow: slowly, and without a master plan.For many years as 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, the birdhouses kept finding her. They gathered on 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.” She decided they had been in storage long enough.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. An A-frame house embellished with gingerbread trim and decorative brackets 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. At that point, Williams and Robert Reimer, head gardener on her property, started the process of reclaiming a long-overlooked point of land. To create space and liberate a stand of existing apple trees, they removed invasive species, then planted oat grass, bird-friendly scrub plants, and fruit-bearing pawpaw trees. To create the neighborhood, she had uniform posts made—tall, “so that you look up at them,” each wrapped with a metal band to deter ambitious squirrels from climbing too high and disturbing the tenants she had in mind. Finally, up went the houses, now totaling 17.The attraction had nothing to do with value or pedigree. “Most of these birdhouses are sort of folk art,” she says. “They were somebody having fun building an unusual structure.” Not Monticello in miniature, not a replica of someone’s own house, just unknown makers, each with “an eye and a kind of humor,” none of them trying to be perfect. The proof is in the details: the gingerbread scallops on one many-holed high-rise (“somebody had a great time with their little saw”), the thatched-roof cottage she prizes because she has never seen another like it, the weather vane crowning the would-be dacha.A church with a brick chimney, an oversized cupola, and Gothic Revival design elements. A country church with a tin roof A rare combination house and feeder that evokes a neoclassical temple Williams calls this one the general store. A colonial revival house with a columned portico built by Larry Smith “It has a kind of Russian dacha feeling,” says Williams. What she didn’t have was history—the dealers who sold them seldom had any to pass along. The record, it turns out, is often recoverable. “The period from 1890 to 1930 is really the birdhouse’s golden age,” says Jacob Torkelson, an architectural historian and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and among the very few scholars in the country studying these objects, whose makers and manufacturers he has painstakingly been identifying, where a name survives. Across those decades, government pattern books encouraged farmers to install birdhouses to reduce pesticide use (the birds would eat the insects), while mail-order companies offered them to homeowners as pure whimsy, not to mention a way of promoting biodiversity in their gardens. Shown photographs of Williams’s collection, Torkelson supplied some of what the dealers couldn’t. He traced one house down to the 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. “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.”A double porch house also built by Larry Smith This pagoda-inspired birdhouse provides multiple roosting spots. An unusual thatched-roof cottage prized by Williams, who has never seen another like it. Williams isn’t finished collecting. Last May at Trade Secrets, the annual Litchfield Hills garden fair she cofounded in 2001 to raise funds for a local nonprofit domestic violence support agency, she stopped at the tent of Jim Sidon, whose company, Sparrow 10:29, crafts avian-size replicas of real buildings. Sidon, based outside Atlanta, came to the work after retiring from the printing industry. His first architectural birdhouse, built in 2017, was a replica of the 1792 Federal-style mansion in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he and his wife had rented two rooms as newlyweds. It was Sidon who recognized, in three of Williams’s houses, the hand of his late friend Larry Smith, a North Georgia birdhouse builder known for his metal roofs and charmingly rustic details. Williams has asked Sidon to build her something new, though she is still deciding exactly what. Unlike her anonymous makers, Sidon 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.”A dovecote-inspired birdhouse offers multiple residences A picturesque house topped with a prominent weather vane 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. In Falls Village, the upkeep routine is minimal: Every couple of years the houses come down, receive a coat of wood preservative, and go back up into the weather. Sidon’s constructions, with cedar exteriors and sealed against the elements, ask even less. His replica of the Newburyport house has stood in his own garden for nearly a decade untouched. “I just hose it off,” he says. None of this troubles Torkelson, a preservationist by training. “These houses were made to be ephemeral,” he says. “They weren’t made to last forever, and they should absolutely be used.”As for the intended residents? Williams thinks the birds mostly prefer making their homes in 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.” Come winter, when the woods go bare and the village shows through the branches, Sidon would bet the houses do get used, songbirds crowding in two and three at a time for warmth. Williams can’t say—she has never once climbed up to look. “If they are nesting,” she says, “I don’t want to bother them.”This story appears in the December issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.Not a subscriber? Join AD for print and digital access now.Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of design in your inbox.