Inside Sartorial Sensation Eva Chen’s Charming Connecticut Abode

The algorithm doesn’t lie. Slowly but surely, the Explore grid on Eva Chen’s Instagram feed morphed from shoes, bags, and beauty serums into ceramics, mirrors, and house tours. Meanwhile, words like patina and names like Paul McCobb began to pepper her conversations and thoughts. All signs pointed to her latest project: the reno-vation of a Connecticut country home for her young family.

For Chen, a born-and-raised New Yorker and sartorial superstar who now works as Instagram’s Director of Fashion and Shopping Partnerships, these newfound fixations marked an even larger shift. “I grew up a first-generation American in Greenwich Village and didn’t know a landscape beyond Manhattan,” she reflects. “To me, nature was Washington Square Park.” A weekend at Troutbeck hotel with her husband, Tom Bannister, an advertising creative director, introduced her to the low-key delights of that sylvan stretch where upstate New York meets Litchfield County. Suddenly the consummate city girl had her sights set on the simple life.

“We fell in love with the quietness and with the landscape, which was wild and not groomed to perfection,” she says, adding that, with two young kids, Ren and Tao, “we needed a break from the weekend birthday-party, playground, park-sprinkler grind.” (The couple recently welcomed their third, River.) After a search that Chen, also a celebrated children’s-book author, likens to the story of Goldilocks, they fell in love with a contemporary Cape Cod house on nearly 10 untamed acres of land. “Some homes were too big, some were too small, but this one felt immediately right,” she recalls of its 2,800 square feet. “The bones were good. The energy was good. I could tell another family had been happy here.”

At the recommendation of their real-estate agent and friends, the couple enlisted the Connecticut-based design firm Hendricks Churchill to update the home. “I introduced myself over DM, my primary form of communication,” Chen jokes. “Heide [Hendricks] and Rafe [Churchill] really understood how to unlock the potential of the house, to make it warm and elegant and not too precious.”