Inside a Design Icon’s Colonial Castle Where Snow White’s Dwarfs May Have Died

When design and retail icon Murray Moss and his partner Franklin Getchell moved from New York City into their new neighborhood in Hamden, Connecticut, their new neighbors — many of whom are accomplished and older academic professionals from Yale nearby — greeted them with ample intrigue and questioning.

“Are you Jewish?” some asked. “Because you’ll need to join the synagogue immediately if you’re going to get a plot in the graveyard.”

Others were put off by Moss’s incongruous sense of design and juxtaposition, an utter departure from the community’s interior-design aesthetic status quo: Mission Style, with its emphasis on lines, flat panels, and handcrafted oak furniture.

Despite the risk of ostracizing themselves from the community, Moss and Getchell stayed the course, turning their Colonial-style home, designed and built by the enigmatic architect Alice Washburn, into a showcase just as forward-thinking as Moss’s retail store, MOSS, was, mixing the works of Hella Jongerius, Maarten Baas and Studio Job.

In this episode of Interior Lives, our design editor Wendy Goodman takes us inside and throughout Moss and Getchell’s Colonial castle, where we learn from Moss just how fun, and tasteful, juxtaposition can be.