“I always wanted to live and work in the same place,” Andy Peklo says. For the last 35 years he’s done just that in this 1835 mill built by a wool merchant on the Pomperaug River in Woodbury, Conn. When Peklo, an architect and furniture maker, bought the mill in 1979, “it was a rundown shell,” he says, without heat, power, or water, and people had been camping in it. But the building had great bones: a chestnut timberframe on a stone foundation and lots of light from its dozens of windows. Peklo lived there alone for many years as he designed houses, built custom furniture, and worked away on the mill. These days his shop, which occupies the first floor, remains a one-man operation. But he shares the living quarters upstairs with his wife and son.

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