how to commune (when you have loads of money)

 

Only Connect

Exhausted by life in Manhattan, John-Paul Philippe decided to migrate to a tiny wooden cabin in the wilds of Connecticut. With just birds (and the occasional bear) for neighbours, the artist and his partner have carved out the most seductively simple wabi-sabi-style existence, where they’ve little choice but to commune with the landscape and nature...

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The chairs were made by prisoners in Maine

After several years of living and working in his Manhattan studio, he began to feel worn down by the city and found himself drawn once again to nature. In 2007, he came across this cabin with five acres of land in Connecticut. 

The previous owner, John McNeely, was a naturalist and ornithologist.  He first spied the little dwelling at Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and went on to dismantle and reconstruct it on his land in Litchfield County... McNeely kept an Andean condor named Veedor and a golden eagle at the cabin, and he would fly both at local shows.  He’d made a clearing to land his microlight, but otherwise left the terrain untouched for the sake of the birds and biodiversity. 

In John-Paul Philippe he saw someone who would become a proper custodian, treating his estate in the right spirit.

He found the tub in a field near the remains of a demolished house and has crowned it with a shower-curtain rail made from a steam-bent branch. In order to admit sunlight into the bathroom, he has also removed some of the chinking from between the cabin’s logs

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