Among the apple trees at the edge of AD100 Hall of Famer Bunny Williams’s storied country garden in Falls Village, Connecticut, stands an eclectic architectural village. The hamlet features a church with a sensible tin roof, a thatched cottage, a pagoda, a red house flying a tiny flag that looks like a general store, and a shuttered confection reminiscent of a Russian dacha. Each structure is raised high on its own post, finished on every side, painted, and weathered like the buildings of a settled town—yet none has a door you could fit a hand through. It is a whimsical settlement fashioned for birds, assembled building by building the way real towns often grow: slowly, organically, and entirely without a master plan.
For many years, as Williams and her husband, the renowned 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 quietly on shelves in the hayloft of her barn, accumulating as the couple traveled and sourced objects.
"When I had two, I didn’t know what to do with them," Williams recalls. "Then all of a sudden there were 10."
Eventually, she decided the pieces had been in storage long enough and deserved a proper setting in the landscape. At that point, Williams and Robert Reimer, the head gardener on her property, started the process of reclaiming a long-overlooked point of land to give the collection a permanent home. To create space and liberate a struggling stand of existing apple trees, they cleared out invasive species, then planted native oat grass, bird-friendly scrub plants, and fruit-bearing pawpaw trees.
To create the neighborhood layout, Williams had uniform wooden posts manufactured—built tall, "so that you look up at them"—with each post wrapped in a smooth metal band to deter ambitious squirrels from climbing too high and disturbing the avian tenants she envisioned. Finally, the houses went up, eventually totaling 17 unique structures.
The attraction of the collection has nothing to do with financial value or high-society pedigree. "Most of these birdhouses are sort of folk art," Williams notes. "They were somebody having fun building an unusual structure."
They are not miniature versions of Monticello, nor are they precise replicas of someone’s personal estate. Instead, they are the creations of unknown makers, each possessing "an eye and a kind of humor," with none of them striving for sterile perfection. The proof is etched into every handcrafted detail: the delicate gingerbread scallops on a multi-holed high-rise where "somebody had a great time with their little saw," the rare thatched-roof cottage that Williams prizes because she has never seen another like it, and the decorative weather vane crowning the structure that resembles a dacha.
What Williams lacked initially was historical context, as the antiques dealers who sold the items seldom had any background to pass along. However, historical records for such vernacular folk art are often recoverable through specialized research.
"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. Torkelson is among the very few scholars in the country studying these specific objects, painstakingly identifying their makers and manufacturers whenever a name or catalog entry survives.
Across those decades, government pattern books frequently encouraged American farmers to install birdhouses to naturally reduce pesticide use by inviting insect-eating birds to the fields. Meanwhile, mail-order companies marketed the structures to homeowners as pure whimsy and a practical way of promoting biodiversity in backyard gardens.
Shown photographs of Williams’s collection, Torkelson was able to supply missing chapters of history that dealers could not provide. He traced one specific house directly to a historic 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 its doors in 1944.
"Birdhouses are these wonderful mirrors to the human condition," Torkelson observes. "They tell us the values that we have as a society or as individuals, in our houses, in our gardens."
Williams’s passion for collecting remains active. 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 by the tent of Jim Sidon. Based outside Atlanta, Sidon runs Sparrow 10:29, a company that crafts avian-scale replicas of real buildings.
Sidon came to the craft after retiring from a career in the printing industry. His very first architectural birdhouse, built in 2017, was an exact 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 the distinct hand of his late friend Larry Smith in three of Williams’s houses. Smith was a well-known North Georgia birdhouse builder recognized for his signature metal roofs and charmingly rustic details.
Williams has since commissioned Sidon to build her something new, though she is still deciding on the precise design. Unlike her anonymous folk-art makers, Sidon numbers and signs every house he creates. "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."
Back in Falls Village, the upkeep routine for the historic collection is minimal and manageable. Every couple of years, the houses are taken down, treated with a fresh coat of wood preservative, and hoisted back up into the elements. Sidon’s modern constructions, featuring durable cedar exteriors and specialized weather-sealing, require even less maintenance. His personal replica of the Newburyport mansion has stood in his own garden for nearly a decade untouched.
"I just hose it off," he notes.
None of this weathering concerns Torkelson, a preservationist by academic training. "These houses were made to be ephemeral," he points out. "They weren’t made to last forever, and they should absolutely be used."
As for the intended residents of this miniature village, Williams suspects the local birds mostly prefer making their nests in the natural trees, where they carry on what she describes as 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," she says. "But they like the atmosphere."
Come winter, when the surrounding woods go bare and the village reveals itself clearly through the stark branches, Sidon would bet that the houses do get utilized, with songbirds crowding inside two or three at a time seeking warmth from the chill. Williams cannot say for certain, as she has never once climbed up a ladder to look inside.
"If they are nesting," she says, "I don’t want to bother them."
