How the former head of menswear design at J.Crew made the leap from fashion to hospitality with The Inn at Kenmore Hall.

Spend any amount of time speaking with the perpetually over-worked, under-slept citizens of the world’s major metropolises and you’ll hear a constant refrain: one day, we tell ourselves, we’ll run away from it all, to the countryside, maybe, to start a bed and breakfast. We’ll give up the hustle and bustle to become innkeepers in some romantic, bucolic ideal. We all dream of it, say we’re going to do it. Mr Frank Muytjens? He really did it.

In a way, Mr Muytjens has been doing the stuff of dreams his whole life. Growing up in the town of Woensdrecht, in the Netherlands, a young, introverted Mr Muytjens, as he has described himself, put his dreams to paper in drawings.

In his adolescence, he began collecting the great culture magazines of the age, such as The Face and i-D, stacks of which adorn his new home and business, The Inn at Kenmore Hall, in Richmond, Massachusetts, whi­ch he shares with his partner, the artist and restaurateur Mr Scott Cole and their vizsla, Dutch.

At the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, where he overlapped with Messrs Victor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (Viktor & Rolf) and Mr Marcel Wanders, and predated Ms Iris van Herpen, Mr Muytjens fell under the thrall of another creative whirlwind, Mr Malcolm McLaren. Inspired by Mr McLaren, who had famously pivoted in his life from music to fashion, Mr Muytjens began pursuing clothing design, both as an art form and a profession.

Upon landing in New York in 1994, with the imagery and iconography of Ms Dorothea Lange and Mr Edward Weston in his mind and a passion for American workwear in his heart, he soon took positions at Ralph Lauren – at Polo Sport, RRL and Purple Label – before eventually becoming the head of men’s design for J.Crew. After years atop the menswear world, during which he was responsible in many ways for shaping the landscape it now inhabits – pioneering the quirky collaborations we now take for granted, for example – Mr Muytjens found himself looking outward, looking for something else.

Almost before he knew what he was looking for, he’d found it, in the form of a well-preserved Georgian home, built in 1792 by a Revolutionary War minuteman turned successful merchant, near where Mr Cole had grown up and where he’d long had a restaurant. Then, very quickly, the wheels of change began to turn.

Mr Muytjens and Mr Cole began replastering and refinishing the house, and in less than a year, they had unearthed the existing grandeur of the home and decorated it with the sumptuous comfort and subtle taste that was always Mr Muytjens’ signature. “I’m good at working with something existing,” he says now. “Like at J.Crew, working with menswear staples and updating them, and now with the house, there is all of this here, and it is just about putting your spin on it.”

The particular spin Mr Muytjens was interested in putting on the house was not at all the Mr Norman Rockwell-style Americana of the area, but something closer to his own home back in the Netherlands. He pulls out a book by the Danish painter Mr Vilhelm Hammershøi to illustrate the palate and feeling he was looking for – and there, in those domestic landscapes of deep, earthen-shaded rooms with warm, natural wood floors, softly scraped by cool morning light, all of the vignettes Mr Muytjens has created in his new home come to life. It is really a kind of magic, sitting by the fire, over a delicious breakfast made by Mr Cole from local ingredients, to feel the entirety of Mr Muytjens’ world around you. “When I was in the fashion industry, I had so many other passions,” he says, “like cooking and gardening and interior decoration and photography – and all that comes into play now within these four walls.”

In these four walls, Mr Muytjens is contently fussing around, clipping blossoms to set in a vase, padding about with Dutch, leafing through the books by Mr Weston he has in the parlour – the worldliest innkeeper imaginable, and possibly the most gracious and generous. “I suppose I get it from my mother,” he says. “Dad was a salesman, Mum was a housewife. So she was in hospitality. She was always making everyone feel welcome and comfortable.”

And still he is planning, looking forward. “Being open,” he says. “Being curious.” But, before he is ready to start talking about a book, or of designing for others, he wants to show us out back where he and Dutch have 20 acres of farmland to explore. Will it be a garden, a place for riding…? “It’s such a blank canvas, and a blank canvas can be intimidating,” he says. But we can’t wait to see what he paints next.