Hasta La Ideas

In this sixth and final entry in our series Dogs on Design, writer Sarah F. Cox visited Connecticut this summer to meet the two viszlas lucky enough to run around Winterhouse with Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.

Maude and Ruby lent their likenesses to the label of last year’s Winterhouse maple syrup.

I first wrote to Bill Drenttel over the summer asking to meet the Winterhouse dogs—two vizslas named Maude and Ruby. Despite the fact that I could only visit on a holiday weekend, he invited me out to Winterhouse headquarters in Connecticut to meet him, his wife Jessica Helfand, and the two beloved family pets. “Like Winterhouse, [your visit] will be a family affair,” he wrote in an email. This was an understatement. After more than an hour on the back porch on a hot July day, I’d met Jessica’s visiting parents, Bill and Jessica’s children—Malcolm and Fiona—the two dogs and two rabbits. The family dressed the dogs in Halloween costumes, demonstrated a dog conga line, and sent me off with homemade maple syrup bearing Maude and Ruby’s images on the bottles.

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