Within the early Sixties, nearest quite a lot of summers renting on Martha’s Winery, Jamie Bernstein’s society purchased a holiday house on a wooded hill in West Redding, Conn. There, 9-year-old Jamie and her more youthful brother, Alexander, devised diverse video games of make-believe, leading between them a myth that they lived the similar form of low-key, small-town lifestyles because the characters on their favourite tv presentations.

It used to be a testomony to the imaginative items of youngsters whose fresh house used to be a duplex condominium around the boulevard from Carnegie Corridor, and whose father used to be the prestigious, heat-seeking “West Side Story” composer and Unused York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein.

“Once we had this little house, we weren’t going to Martha’s Vineyard and we were much closer to Manhattan, which was probably way more convenient for my parents,” stated Ms. Bernstein, 70, the writer of the 2018 memoir “Famous Father Girl” and the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York,” a unused podcast concerning the Philharmonic produced by way of the orchestra and the people radio station WQXR. “It meant that we could go there on the weekends during the regular part of the year.”

Next, when her sister Nina used to be born in 1962, “we were a family of five,” Ms. Bernstein persisted. “Plus the nanny and the cook who sometimes came up with us on the weekends. And suddenly the house seemed too small.”

A couple of months after, her mom, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an actor and artist, introduced that she had simply purchased a bulky, unused nation park. “And I guess I must have asked, ‘Well, how much did it cost?’” Ms. Bernstein recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about that. It was so expensive I can’t even say it out loud.’ And my brother and I were saying, ‘Oh, come on, how much was it? How much was it?’ We badgered her until finally she whispered, ‘80.’”

Her youngsters gasped: “$80 — it cost $80?”

In that very same murmur, Mrs. Bernstein corrected them: “$80,000.”

What in the ones days appeared a lordly sum purchased a former horse farm with a lake, a tennis court docket and outbuildings on six and a part acres in Fairfield, Conn. Over time, alternative parcels of jungle — virtually 12 acres’ significance — have been bought to provide the society extra privateness and extra of an resignation from city cares.

“It was marvelous,” Ms. Bernstein stated. “We spent many summers here, and almost every weekend during the rest of the year. We all loved it.”

Jamie Bernstein, 70

Profession: Writer, filmmaker, podcast host

Taking the recovery: “We go to the house to be completely relaxed. It’s like the antidote to New York life.”

Nearest Mr. Bernstein’s dying in 1990 (Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978), the 3 youngsters inherited the attribute. However it’s Jamie who’s maximum incessantly in place of abode — good-looking a lot each weekend.

As when their folks have been alive, the compound is a meeting spot for birthdays and vacations, and for fiercely contested rounds of Anagrams. In recent times, it has additionally served as a collection for the next movie “Maestro,” a portrait of the Bernsteins’ sophisticated marriage directed by way of and starring Bradley Cooper. (Carey Mulligan performs Felicia.)

“He wanted an authenticity about how he was evoking our dad and his world,” Ms. Bernstein stated of Mr. Cooper. “He was very curious to come up here and visit, and that’s when he decided he wanted to come back and shoot in and around the house. Bradley totally got why this place was so great and how it contains the family DNA.”

Certainly, the home, with its graciously proportioned rooms, has slightly been altered because the days when it used to be populated by way of the senior Bernsteins and their admirable and excellent buddies — between them, Stephen Sondheim (who didn’t somewhat speed it in stride when Jamie beat him at Anagrams), Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols and Richard Avedon (who took the image of Jamie that sits amongst a grab of society pictures in the lounge).

“When we got older, we realized, ‘Boy, we had a lot of cool people at our house,’” Ms. Bernstein stated. “But when we were little, they were just our parents’ friends. To us, they were just Steve and Jerry and Mike and Dick.”

It’s going to had been Mr. Sondheim who purchased his “West Side Story” collaborator the abacus that sits on a shelf within the eating room — “I can’t guarantee that’s the case,” she stated — and it used to be Mr. Sondheim or possibly Mr. Nichols who purchased the high quality telescope at the flooring close by.

“There was a while there when our parents would have these Christmas parties for all their pals,” Ms. Bernstein stated. “And there was a competitiveness about the present-giving that became so oppressive that my mother said, ‘We’re not having these parties anymore.’”

The furnishings — large on rattan, wicker and bamboo — conjures a summer season pavilion. So does the eating room, which is anchored by way of a white-painted desk and chairs, and stuffed with vegetation. Its entryway, framed by way of a trellis, provides to the semblance.

“Our mother was a kind of brilliant, instinctive decorator,” Ms. Bernstein stated. “Everyplace we lived was elegant but comfortable.”

She recalled dinners together with her father or mom on the head of the desk. Beneath the carpet used to be a plug for a bell to summon the backup, “and my parents would start disappearing,” Ms. Bernstein stated. “They would go lower and lower down in their chair, as their foot groped for the buzzer.”

The Steinway child lavish in the lounge used to be a present to Mr. Bernstein from a youth piano professor, Helen Coates, who after turned into his secretary. It used to be Ms. Coates who determinedly made the successful bid when, in 1949, there used to be an public sale to boost cash for the library in Lenox, Collection., and Mr. Bernstein made a portray, supposedly of Salome doing her Dance of the Seven Veils, to assistance the reason.

“Helen acquired it, so that for the rest of time nobody would see it,” Ms. Bernstein stated, pointing to her father’s well-meaning paintings striking in a nook now not some distance from the piano.

“My father,” she added, somewhat unnecessarily, “was not visually talented.”

The memories that Ms. Bernstein and her siblings have in their youth on the Fairfield space — society swims; their father sporting a saltshaker to the vegetable farmland within the morning to correctly season his selected breakfast; magnificent lunches of crammed tomatoes with selfmade mayonnaise at the terrace — had been overlaid by way of more moderen recollections. And the after life, the kids of the Bernstein youngsters, now have their very own historical past right here and, after all, their very own recollections.

“That,” Ms. Bernstein stated, “is the beauty of having a house that stays in the family.”

“If some wallpaper is coming unglued, if some fabrics are fading, if some drawer fronts are hanging by a thread and cabinets are stuffed with baffling detritus — well, it’s all part of the family DNA.

“We don’t fix things,” Ms. Bernstein conceded. “There is a distinct element of funk in this house now. It’s kind of funky. But we’re kind of funky, too.”

For weekly e-mail updates on residential actual property information, enroll right here.