Artist and old-house romantic Hunt Slonem animates the rooms of his 1880s chateau in Massachusetts with full-bodied color, a lifetime of antiques, and—yes—his famed bunny paintings.
Searles Castle, a majestic 40-room, over 68,000-square-foot chateau sitting on 80 acres in the Rockwellian village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was built in 1884 and finished around 1888. When Hunt Slonem, a world-renowned painter, sculptor, and printmaker, bought the castle as a weekend home in 2021, the acquisition felt a little like destiny: a one-of-a-kind house for a one-of-a-kind man. And a walk through his version of the place today reveals how they are, improbably, one-of-a-kind in the same way.
“Everybody thinks I work with a decorator, but I don’t see any who decorate like I do. And I never use an architect,” Slonem says of his process when he buys an old house, one of the many things he collects. His book, The Spirited Homes of Hunt Slonem, catalogs six historic properties he restored and creatively reimagined. “I don’t change rooms or anything like that. I just improve them. And I try not to do it all at once—that’s always a mistake.”
To each house, and perhaps especially to this one, he brings his playful artist’s eye and his gift for creating a space that feels both like a museum and a place where you can put your feet up. But, most of all, he brings his stuff. “Unfortunately, I always like to buy new things. I have a whole armory full of all kinds of furniture,” he says.
The castle had lived many lives before Slonem moved in and gave it his own. The exteriors were designed by the seminal American architecture firm McKim, Mead & White (you’ve seen principal Stanford White’s Washington Square Arch?). A San Francisco railroad tycoon’s widow returned to her hometown of Great Barrington when she inherited the property from her aunt. She had met a fellow named Edward Francis Searles, 21 years her junior, some years previously in California; she promptly dismissed McKim, Mead & White and hired Searles to design the castle’s interiors and married him soon thereafter. When she died in 1891, the now extravagantly wealthy Searles held onto the castle until 1920, when he died. Its post-residence life has included stints as a girls’ school, a home insurance company office, a golf club, and—from the 1980s until Slonem bought it—a school for gifted but troubled students. “They left 18 dumpsters’ worth of stuff for me to get rid of,” the artist says in a voice that’s earth-deep but tinged with something like melody.
"I don’t change rooms or anything like that. I just improve them.
And I try not to do it all at once— that’s always a mistake.”
—ARTIST HUNT SLONEM
With the chalkboards and industrial furniture gone, he could see that even after generations of owners, not only was the place still structurally sound, but the floors and finishes were remarkably undamaged, save for a few balusters that had to be painstakingly replicated and replaced.
But one glaring problem predated all of that. “Mr. Searles had taken the main staircase, the big one to the right as you walk through the front door, which reputedly belonged to one of the royal families of England, and put it in his other house,” Slonem says. “In its place was a crummy wooden staircase. I had the original reproduced, which took a year and a half, and it made the whole house.” He says this as casually as if he were talking about changing out a light switch, but it took some doing. He visited the original in Searles’s other home in Methuen, Massachusetts, and found a rare copy of a book called Houses of the Berkshires, which included a photo of the staircase being built.
After that came the fun part: filling the house until it felt like a home. Slonem raided his armory (where, instead of weaponry, he stockpiled his collections), raided some of his other properties, and, yes, bought some new things. He brought in busts (“I’m a big marble bust lover”) of Grover Cleveland and Mary Todd Lincoln. A collection of seashells for a glass display case in a second-floor room. And, in the entrance hall, furniture by the 19th- century New Orleans craftsman Henry Siebrecht—a Gothic Revival sofa and twin Siebrecht armchairs, the only matching pair Slonem has ever seen.
And of course there are dozens of bunny paintings, the works Slonem has been creating since the 1980s and for which he is perhaps most widely known. “I found a ton of them that I had forgotten about,” he notes, “so I put them on the fourth floor.”
Slonem shrugs. Like Searles Castle itself, his style is both meticulous and idiosyncratic, both grandiose and homey. “I just do my thing,” he says. “I don’t like modern things very much. But that’s my deal. I’m a maximalist. I’m more of a collector than a decorator. I just try to place what I like. That’s my advice to anyone who might like looking at my home: Make it all work and don’t listen to the rules.”