When we bought an 1890 Victorian farmhouse on six acres in Middletown, New York, for $200,000, all I could think of was covering the more than ten-foot-high walls - which are set off by seven-inch-wide and three-inch-deep moldings and which, in the parlor and living room, surround nine-foot-high arched pocket doors - in wallpaper. Rich, dark, epic wallpaper. I think I’ve actually blocked out how much that kind of wallpaper costs because I couldn’t even afford the Zuber coffee table book, let alone one roll of a mural. I couldn’t foresee how the sales from the album of my one-woman show would support my wallpaper habit, especially since I hadn’t yet raised enough money to record the album.

So I sat on the idea. For two years. I researched patterns and companies instead of going to sleep at night, ruining my eyesight and promoting my carpal tunnel.

In the meantime, we lived in our house. We like to say that our house, because it has no insulation, because it boasts its original windows, because you can see the outside light through cracks in the front doors and the attic ceiling, because the wind outside can actually blow things over on the inside, we like to say that the inside and outside of our house have a seamlessness that more often is the opposite of the definition of a house.

Soon, our son Henry’s room, the room that has one of the house’s most remarkable features, a Victorian Gothic angel window, will host a thousand lady beetles on the sunny spots of the window and its casing, before they live their life as his roommates and I need to vacuum them off the rug (the internet tells us that they bite and stain but we’ve so far found them respectful). A bat swiped my hair once as I made my way through the purgatory of broken caned chairs in the attic. We’ve fed baby mice on the kitchen floor after we’d killed their mother (by mistake?) in a snap trap. I’m pretty sure that I listened to a squirrel give birth inside the staircase wall. If I started actually wearing my vintage scarf collection, we could have a proper Grey Gardens.

The Outside Inside has made us feel even more kinship with the animals in our patch of ecosystem. We live with deer, fox, wild turkey, coyotes, rabbits, a bear, hawks, vultures, eagles, and all the birds, and insects, salamanders, turtles, frogs, and toads a seven year old can catch and count. Our dog, Walrus, has killed two groundhogs and a chipmunk and our dog, Mud, was sprayed by a skunk just yesterday. We’ve been tracking a fox in this snowy winter and this week followed the dogs into the woods to find a fawn who’d probably fallen to that very fox and was sleeping a forever sleep, its rib cage cleaned, in the icy snow.

We have a tower in this house. There is a narrow staircase that leads up from the second floor landing into a small, square, room that sits atop the roofline, with four windows and an arched ceiling. One can look over the railing to the foyer floor three floors below and, as the house sits atop a hill, you can see Bear Mountain and the Shawangunks from the windows on a clear day.

Across the road are the fields of black dirt that once provided the reason for this house and presumably paid for it to be built. It was a celery farm, acres and acres of celery that was sold in Manhattan by a man named George Fish, whose offices were at 406 West 14th Street.

At some point, the Fish land was sold to the Bowser Family, for whom our road was named when it was named and paved in 1957, and from whom we bought our house. Frances Bowser and her sister Sophie Konefal lived together in this house until they were each almost a century old. We still find their chewing gum and panty hose stuck into cracks in the walls in what we imagine with kinship was their effort to keep the outside out. After Frances and Sophie died, the house sat empty and on the market for years before we came along and thought it was just the money pit we’d been looking and longing for.

The Bowsers sold the black dirt to a man named Song who lives in the city and rents his cabin on the land to friends on which to hunt over the weekends. Much of the black dirt, surrounded by irrigation trenches, has flooded, and left as such, turned into, what seems like, sometimes, our own aquatic bird sanctuary. In the months that the trees are bare of leaves, we can watch geese and ducks nesting and squabbling and a heron’s takeoffs and landings. Last March, when the temperature was right, we began doing our almost religious reading of a book chapter together, before bed, and upon waking with coffee, in the tower. We were reading E.B. White’s “The Trumpet of the Swan” and I looked out the tower window and saw something bright white floating against the grim early spring landscape. It turned out to be a pair of swans. They weren’t trumpeters, they were mute swans with golden beaks or bills (I looked it up and apparently they mean the same thing where a swan is concerned). We began to walk across the fields every day as far as the irrigation ditch to watch them and to have the best reason to sit still and quiet and just watch and listen. That’s where we got to experience the sun warming the rocks more and more as the month went on and delighted to take off our coats while we meditated with the animals.

We watched them quietly every day and it seemed as if the female was nesting, as she would disappear behind the reeds for long periods of time and only her mate would be seen floating and floating and eating. Then the leaves emerged and our view was obstructed and we were expelled from our garden when I began to worry that we would be shot by city folk from a tree stand while trying to watch the swans, so we had to miss them and imagine what they were up to just on the other side of the burgeoning tree line.

But quickly after a summer that busied us with our first vegetable garden, the leaves turned and fell again and in the fall the cygnets were revealed to us, three of them, already difficult to distinguish from their sire and dam, before they left us for the new winter.

Here we are now, waiting for three feet of snow and ice to melt and to see if they will return.

The swans came into the house though, like the Hurricane Isaias winds, even when we couldn’t visit them, and they took over our aesthetic imaginations in the year since we first, astonished, saw them out the window. Our devotion to Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, which we’d taken Henry to see the previous December at City Center, seemed to come full circle and Henry’s fixation on the trumpet as his favorite musical instrument pre-dated both our reading the E.B. White story and discovering the swans from the tower. We had bought him a trumpet for Christmas a few months before and to mark the serendipity bought him a swan stuffie for easter.

Adam Cooper in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake photographed by Hugo Glendinning.

I discovered Audubon. In that deep way. Audubon is like Klenex; the name encompasses so much more now than a tissue or a naturalist. I’d always known Audubon but until I began listening to the birds’ morning conversations when I crept outside at dawn in my slippers to let the dogs pee, or until I had juvenile red-tailed hawks play in the hot sky directly over my head while emergency planting bulbs in the garden, or watched a murder of titanic crows battle two of those juveniles when they were almost full-grown over the territory of my favorite of our maple trees, I hadn’t sought out Audubon to manifest my feeling for these friends. Once I did, I became devoted to his colors and his elegant grasses and to the particular way he drew a hawk about to kill a bullfrog or a marsh hare: with an equal love and respect for the predator and the prey. I love our fox and our fawn and can’t be persuaded to take a side.

So the wallpaper. I knew what I was meant to do.

I have collaged and decoupaged my whole life. I like to think that I am in a small class of humans who have been professionals at it. I have been paid to decoupage and collage and have honed my own techniques that have sometimes merited some money, warranting my years of joyous amateur research.

Parlor wall experiment with new sideboard. Ignore the PEX.

I am decoupaging the walls of our house. I am turning the walls of each room of our house into an animal habitat inspired by Audubon’s paintings and by our native birds by making my own wallpaper. The parlor, the parlor that looks out over the celery-field-turned-bird-sanctuary, will be a swan habitat when it is finished. I created my own grasses and mosses on the computer and decoupaged them, strand by strand and clump by clump onto the wall, and added a few moths and a frog which are photographs I cut from National Geographic Magazine. The frog is a photograph by another of our family’s favorite naturalists and species protectors, Joel Sartore.

The dining room will be a raptor habitat with browns and rusts on a deep, dark blue, and the master bedroom will be a bluebird habitat, one of our backyard birds and the state bird of New York. The bathroom will be hummingbirds. The living room may digress and be mammalian, a tribute to our favorite walruses and rhinoceroses, and to our road’s special distinction of revealing 13,000 year-old mastodon bones that helped prove the theory that Clovis hunters killed such hulking animals by chopping through their achilles tendons, a technique they likely learned from wolves. When the human animal is the predator I can take a side. I’ll root for the mastodon and the wolf every time. (So, fuck you, Wisconsin.)

When I showed my friend that I’d turned my parlor into a swan habitat, my friend who is the proprietress and chef at an inn in Montgomery, New York, on the Wallkill River, when I explained to her my decorating inspirations and intentions she asked if I’d be interested in doing a complete redesign of her inn, The Borland House, using the same passions and themes. I took out my collection of antique and vintage design and decorating books, and my Dorothy Draper, Elsie de Wolfe, and Parish Hadley books, and my collection of binders of page protectors of furnishings from Architectural Digest and other design magazines that I began compiling in 1996 and I made a list of the elements that currently define my aesthetic. Among those elements are banquet lamps, ebonized wood, and Edwardian electroplated silver, traditional caning, Oushak rugs, and tiger-stripe, oval, convex-glass, picture frames. Pipe-mounted gas fixtures and rosewood Victorian tub chairs. The colors navy, cranberry, and gold. Kohn bentwood. Maison Gatti benches and planters. Flemish bird tapestries. Backgammon. Cut glass. Palms. Books. Books about wolves.

And beside the visceral feeling that I get from certain colors and materials when they communicate, I also get pretty excited about changing the narratives of old houses to include their broader histories. My imagination is not entirely captured by the men in whose names beautiful houses are often built and whose stories they are often here to tell us and whose portraits are so readily available for hanging. I’d like to also bring inside what was here before the men in all the oil paintings built the houses. The mastodons who were here thousands of years ago, the indigenous people who were here hundreds years ago, the women who have been here for a long time but for whom a lot fewer houses were named. And all the animals of all time.

When my friend not only agreed that General Borland, a revolutionary war hero, would have to share the space but she contributed that Borland’s wife worked towards abolition and we could learn more about her, we drew up a budget and she hired me. The painters finished the front and rear foyer yesterday with Greenmount Silk on the walls and Gray Lake on the ceiling and I begin installing grasses, mosses, and moths this afternoon.

A decoupaged sign made with photographs of a Flemish tapestry and a banner inspired by an antique book cover.

I’m excited to start sharing the processes and would love for you to follow along at @bowserhouse and @theborlandhouse.

And then maybe when I’m done the wallpaper will pay to record my album instead of the other way around.