Farmhouse fusion
When you’ve been building houses for nearly 40 years, you know what excites the people who will someday live in them. Expansive gathering spaces. Luxurious personal spaces. Flexible spaces for work or for play.
Jerry and Sandy Effren, the husband-and-wife team behind Greyrock Homes, brought this experience to the table as they planned TOH’s second Idea House of 2020. The 3,700-square-foot farmhouse they built in Norwalk, Connecticut, would fuse their years of home-building knowhow with the latest innovations in materials, features, and finishes—as well as a few items from their personal wish list.
They chose a hilltop site that overlooks a golf course bordered by the grassy tidal waters of Long Island Sound. Knowing this would be a house that’s all about the views, architect Jim Jamieson, the Effrens’ longtime collaborator, sketched out a 21st-century version of the sort of building that might have occupied that slope more than a century ago. “Jerry had a vision of an old barn or farmhouse that might
