A Place to Dream

She Travels Down Runways and Around the World, but Diane Von Furstenberg Never Strays From Her Idyllic Home in the Country for Too Long.

- Hal Rubenstein

In New York, Diane von Furstenberg sleeps in a glass-walled bedroom in an apartment atop her headquarters and flagship store smack in the middle of the West Side’s Meatpacking District, Manhattan’s mecca for everything new and everyone noisy. Through the windows you can hear trucks slamming against the cobblestone streets, and you note that the only trees in view are those planted up on the High Line, the former train tracks that have been miraculously transformed into an elevated park that necklaces the area. “It’s very exciting here; I love it,” says von Furstenberg, surveying the neighborhood she was instrumental in creating. “But as a place to be alone with your thoughts or the people you care about, it’s not exactly what nature had in mind.”

Mother Nature, however, would probably declare her country home just this side of paradise. For in western Connecticut, along a road so winding, visitors always swear they’ve gone the wrong way, you come to a place that’s seductively sylvan. Even before getting out of your car, you’re trying to figure out ways to get the woman who’s welcoming you to let you stay longer. Frankly, if you pulled up to a log cabin lit by a hand cranked generator, you still might never want to leave, since von Furstenberg is as celebrated for her beguiling charm as she is for fashioning one of retail’s greatest success stories, which started back in the ’70s with her now-legendary wrap dresses.