Architectural Digest: December 2025
Written by Derek Blasberg
Photography by Michael P. H. Clifford and Christian Harder
Styled by Colin King
View Article
When the Canadian-born, New York–based tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left Salesforce, which in 2021 had acquired Slack, the revolutionary workplace-messaging platform that he cofounded, his farewell email teased a new hobby. “Can I tell you something?” he wrote. “I fantasize about gardening.”
“Everyone thought he was joking—but here we are!” says Jen Rubio, Butterfield’s wife, and a cofounder of Away, the sleek direct-to-consumer luggage brand. Less than five years later, the couple’s expansive Southampton gardens now include vegetables, herbs, berries, and allées of fruit trees, not to mention 1,000 shrubs and more than 5,000 perennials. “Stewart brings in ripe vegetables every day, and we plan our meals around whatever he’s pulled. He pickles things and sends jars to friends! The garden is really Stewart’s happy place. It grounds him, quite literally.
The couple purchased their summer home (main base is in New York’s West Village) in 2022. Designed by architect Grosvenor Atterbury, the house was built in the 1910s and, true to its era, is expansively scaled with an imposing exterior of swell belly bricks.
When Butterfield and Rubio first visited, the interiors had been stripped and the gardens reduced to flat lawn. It was all “a blank canvas,” says Rubio, “so someone could come in and make it their own.” Continuing, she notes, “I loved the proportions, the history, the bones,” citing especially its “eyebrow windows”—one of Atterbury’s Hamptons trademarks—and a pair of “incredible” century-old trees that help anchor the property. “The house had personality.”
