Real Estate

Wylie at heart

ALL THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS: Wylie Dufresne and Maile Carpenter, pictured with daughter Sawyer, are turning a white shed on their 5 1/2-acre Connecticut property into a playhouse.

ALL THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS: Wylie Dufresne and Maile Carpenter, pictured with daughter Sawyer, are turning a white shed on their 5 1/2-acre Connecticut property into a playhouse. (Christian Johnston (4))

The living room (above) features a stone fireplace, orange couches and a salt-and-pepper shag carpet. (
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The vaulted master bedroom (above), with its rustic wooden bed, is upstairs. (
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Bucky the deer (
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Maile Carpenter and Wylie Dufresne’s new kitchen looks surprisingly normal.

One half-expects to find Willy Wonka-like gadgets and instruments. After all, Maile (pronounced my-lee) is the editor-in-chief of Food Network magazine, and her husband, Wylie, is sometimes described as the mad scientist of molecular gastronomy. (He’s the chef behind one of the most lauded restaurants in New York, wd-50, where he’s known for adding things like hydrocolloids to dishes.)

But at the couple’s weekend house, tucked away in Lyme, Conn., there are no Bunsen burners, test tubes or Oompa Loompas in sight. Instead, there’s a clean, bright island kitchen in the two-story, three-bedroom, two-bathroom Cape Cod-style house they recently bought.

“Having a kitchen like this makes me enjoy cooking much more than in the city,” Dufresne says. (The kitchen in their apartment at Peter Cooper Village is, apparently, not as impressive.) “My kitchen [at wd-50] is 900 square feet. I’m not bragging. It’s just, you become in some ways spoiled. And there’s no one I’d rather cook for than my family.”

The couple put a lot of work into redoing this kitchen/dining area, which takes up a good chunk of the ground floor, during the past few months.

“We gutted it,” says Carpenter. “It was very dark. We also tiled the floor.”

It is now a big open space. (“The age of the closed-off kitchen is over,” Dufresne flatly declares.)

On the kitchen’s far end is a stainless-steel refrigerator, a restaurant-grade Viking stove and hood and a handsome counter. The eccentric elements are ones that you have to look for, like a foot-pedal-operated sink (a convenient way not to get messy fingers on the knobs). Or a microwave stowed away in a drawer in the island.

Overlooking it all is a green neon clock.

“My dad made that clock,” Dufresne says. “He was one of the preeminent neon-clock refurbishers in America.”

But these slightly off-kilter touches are small. More noticeable is the espresso maker and the soda maker. (“Not a favorite,” Dufresne says of the soda maker, “but gets honorable mention.”)

Beyond the kitchen, the roughly 3,200-square-foot home has a living room that features a stone fireplace (with an ax), a flat-screen TV, a salt-and-pepper shag carpet from a Home Depot carpet sale and comfy orange couches from Crate & Barrel.

On the wall is a photo of the Staten Island Ferry, taken by Carpenter’s brother-in-law, Travis Huggett.

Upstairs is the master bedroom and daughter Sawyer’s loft-like bedroom.

And the family is growing. Sawyer, who recently turned 3, got a sister, Ellery Nell, about two weeks ago.

Dufresne and Carpenter met when he was opening wd-50 and she was sent by Time Out New York to write about the restaurant.

They both shared a passion for food — aside from being the editor of Food Network magazine, Carpenter graduated from the French Culinary Institute (in 1999), where Dufresne also graduated, in ’93 — and a natural braininess. She was a journalism major at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and he was a philosophy major at Colby College. A year and a half later, they were dating. Four years ago, they got married.

They started looking for a weekend getaway place in Connecticut last summer, not far from Carpenter’s parents, who are about 30 minutes away in Mystic.

“We didn’t want to see too many people,” Dufresne says. “It’s nice to see no one on the weekend.”

“We were in contract for another house down the street,” Carpenter says of a deal that fell through. The house, which was built in the 1800s, was a bit too rustic for this young family. “It failed all sorts of safety standards. Mainly structural and ventilation problems, from the roof to the basement.”

They even looked at a second house from the 1770s. “We passed on it early on because we both walked out convinced that it was haunted,” Carpenter says. “And we aren’t exactly believers in ghosts, either. I’m pretty sure somebody who’s about 200 years old is still living there, and I really didn’t want to move in with him.”

The couple realized the “romance goes away quickly” (as Dufresne says) when you have to actually live in a centuries-old house.

The house they eventually chose was built in the 1980s but feels older. And it has plenty of room to expand.

The hourglass-shaped, 5 1/2- acre property comes with a white shed, which Carpenter and Dufresne are planning on turning into a playhouse for the kids. Carpenter’s sister, Ridge, is designing it.

The size of the property is important. “We thought of how we would expand it if we hit the Powerball,” Dufresne says. There’s already a small, closed-off garden and an enormous, barn-sized three-car garage.

“The loft [above the cars] is going to be Wylie’s man cave,” Carpenter says.

The only thing that stands out to a visitor as slightly odd is the fake deer (named Bucky) standing next to the garage. Carpenter got Dufresne the deer for Father’s Day.

“Want to take a shot at it?” Dufresne asks. (We’re not sure if he’s kidding at first, but apparently he has a crossbow and an air rifle, and Bucky is used for target practice.)

Should a real deer come through the property, they could always cook their kill in the outdoor fire pit.

“This feels like a place to grow,” Dufresne says. “When I think about this, I think it will be Sawyer’s one day. I’ll come here as a visitor. And I like that.”

Maile Carpenter & WYLIE DUFRESNE’S

FAVORITE THINGS

* The espresso maker

* The foot-pedal-operated sink

* The drawer microwave

* The neon clock that Wylie’s dad gave them

* Bucky the deer

* A photo of the Staten Island Ferry taken by Travis Huggett

* The shed with a blue door, to be converted to a playhouse

* The kids’ room loft

* The fire pit