--- title: "Christopher Lloyd’s new memoir opens at Waveny, the Olmsted-designed Connecticut estate he grew up on" url: https://badiyaa.com/christopher-lloyd-memoir-waveny-connecticut-estate/ published: 2026-10-29T15:14:00+00:00 modified: 2026-10-29T15:14:00+00:00 section: Entertainment publisher: Badiyaa --- # Christopher Lloyd’s new memoir opens at Waveny, the Olmsted-designed Connecticut estate he grew up on In My Own Time, out October 27, describes a childhood raised by governesses at a 1912 New Canaan mansion his family later handed to the town. Before he was Doc Brown, Christopher Lloyd was a boy wandering the lawns of a Connecticut castle. His new memoir, *In My Own Time*, went on sale on Tuesday, October 27, and it opens at Waveny, the New Canaan estate where he spent his childhood among governesses, gardens and a polo field. The setting is not a figure of speech. Waveny House is a 1912 mansion locals call “the castle,” designed by architect William Tubby and set in roughly 300 acres of fields, ponds and trails. Its grounds were shaped by the Olmsted Brothers, the firm run by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New York’s Central Park. ## A childhood of privilege, and of distance The publisher’s description of the 256-page book promises an “isolated childhood of privilege.” Lloyd, it says, was “raised primarily by governesses” and became a quiet observer of the adults around him, including the strained dynamic between his creative mother and his stern father. His mother was Ruth Lapham Lloyd. She married Samuel R. Lloyd in 1924, had seven children, and moved the family into the Waveny mansion in 1940. Her father, Lewis H. Lapham, had bought the land in 1904 and hired the Olmsted firm to site a new house and lay out terraces, gardens and farm buildings around it. Lloyd has never hidden how much the place matters to him. At the house’s 100th anniversary in 2012 he told the crowd: “This Waveny meant so much to me. It still means that much to me.” ## How a family estate became a town park The story of Waveny is also the story of a private estate turning public, and it is worth laying out in order because the dates span more than seven decades: - **1895:** leather executive Thomas B. Hall buys a 90-acre farm on the site and starts building. - **1904:** Lewis H. Lapham buys the property and brings in the Olmsted Brothers. - **1911 to 1917:** the new house goes up, and Olmsted landscape architects Percival Gallagher and A. Chandler Manning work on the plantings with Antoinette Lapham. - **1940:** Ruth Lapham Lloyd moves in with her children, Christopher among them. - **1967:** the family gives most of the land to New Canaan and sells the house with its surrounding acreage to the town for $1.5 million. - **2019:** the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More than 100 letters between the Lapham family and the Olmsted firm still sit in the National Park Service’s Olmsted archives in Brookline, Massachusetts. In one running thread, John Charles Olmsted tried and failed to persuade the Laphams to take up scientific farming. Lloyd backed that heritage push himself. In late 2014, while the town debated seeking a National Register listing, he wrote to the Town Council urging it to go ahead. ## Why the opening chapter matters Lloyd, now a three-time Emmy winner, built a career on intense, unpredictable characters: Taber in *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*, Reverend Jim Ignatowski on *Taxi*, Uncle Fester in *The Addams Family* and the villainous Judge Doom in *Who Framed Roger Rabbit*. The book frames those performances as the work of a watcher, and it places the origin of that habit on Waveny’s grounds. The memoir also covers his years in theater, his struggles with addiction and his recent work, from a disembodied head in *Wednesday* to the title role in a stage *King Lear*. His most recent Emmy nomination came in 2024, for a guest role on the comedy *Hacks*. The mansion itself is still in daily use. Visitors who want to see where Doc Brown grew up can walk the grounds bordered by Farm Road and the Merritt Parkway, next to New Canaan High School, which stands on land the Lloyd family gave the town. The hardcover lists at $32.50. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Waveny Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveny_Park) *Image: Karl Thomas Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*