Mix Master

For globe-trotting fabric impresario John Robshaw, his Connecticut country house is yet another opportunity to layer his signature patterns and colors with abandon.

- Nancy Hass

So strongly does a stripped-down, finely wrought New England aesthetic blow through Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, tucked in the northwest corner of the state along the border of Massachu setts, that only those with truly fearless taste seem able to stand up to it—to decorate in counterpoint. Only the bold manage to reference the grace of the area’s centuries-old winding roads and well-preserved late-Colonial architecture while also going blithely off the rails.

Exhibit No. 1: the early-19th-century cottage on eight acres owned by textile designer John Robshaw. Instead of outfitting the weekend place he shares with his girlfriend, photographer Rachel Schwarz, in American and English antiques and gently worn fine carpets, as is the custom in these parts, Robshaw— a brawny six-foot-two charmer with a Byronesque tousle of hair and an aw-shucks grin—has turned his 2,000-square-foot residence into an explosion of color and pattern that perfectly reflects his lush, worldly sensibility and peripatetic existence. “I enjoy that kind of collage in which things don’t quite make sense,” he says.