The jewellery designer Brent Neale Winston remembers the primary time she paid a go to to Hay Fever, a stately three-story dwelling in Locust Valley, New York. Oversize traditional hinges adorned the doorway door to the property, which dates to 1668. Inside, the palette skewed adventurous, as envisioned by its earlier proprietor, the inside designer Jeffrey Bilhuber. She was smitten. “One factor with fairly {{{hardware}}}, one factor that makes use of shade in an attention-grabbing methodology, whether or not or not or not it’s a space or a bowl or a glass, I’m frequently drawn to that,” Winston says.
It was the summer time season season of 2019, and the house was on the market within the market, however the designer and her husband, Michael Winston, who works in exact property funding, weren’t able to decide to a weekend retreat for his or her youthful household. “He’s a metropolis mouse,” she says of his early hesitation. Months later, on account of the pandemic upended the conventional order of factors, the Extended Island hideaway—set on two verdant acres improbably nestled all through the middle of metropolis—floated as soon as extra to concepts. She and her husband had been furthermore drawn to the property’s irresistible moniker, Hay Fever, named by earlier house owners, the Hay household, after a Noël Coward play.
The couple made a suggestion and moved in by June 2020, discovering consolation all through the convivial spirit of the place, which had beforehand served as an inn and a Quaker college. “I don’t know whether or not or not or not this sounds considerably bit woo-woo,” Winston says, “nonetheless it merely has an lovely vitality about it.”
4 years later, Hay Fever has blossomed into its newest incarnation: vivid and playfully elegant, very like Winston herself. “Layered is frequently [the word]—it’s how she clothes, it’s how she types her jewellery,” says Ramsey Lyons, the Pittsburgh-based inside designer on the issue, who occurs to be Winston’s older sister. The weekend residence marks their first full-scale collaboration, eased by a shared aesthetic educated by their eclectic Baltimore upbringing.
The duty before them—to remake an already photogenic dwelling to wholly go properly with its new inhabitants—was, in a technique, second nature to Winston. Alongside alongside along with her fine-jewelry model, Brent Neale, she is often requested to reset a consumer’s heirloom stone correct proper right into a custom-made creation, preserving continuity whereas leaning into particular particular person attraction.
The sisters first set their sights on the first mattress room. Out went the high-drama scarlet damask on the partitions; as a substitute, an ethereal Quadrille paper with a tree-and-topiary motif now echoes the towering cones of ivy all through the yard exterior. That preliminary transformation was a thrill, Winston says: “It begins to primarily actually really feel like a bit of clothes being tailor-made to you.”
Sample play is a seamless all by way of the home. “I like an over-the-top second,” Winston says. The late Mario Buatta isn’t solely a maximalist lodestar: A pair of the decorator’s lacquer chairs, sourced from Eerdmans in Manhattan, communes inside the lounge with a striped couch, zebra-print armchairs, and structured floral curtains set in opposition to pale aquamarine partitions. The quantity is cranked up all through the adjoining library, the place the built-in shelving is painted high-gloss lipstick pink; a tortoiseshell paper on the ceiling and an antelope-patterned rug act as idiosyncratic neutrals.
For Lyons, each downside is additional extra prone to have a minimal of 1 leap of religion, helped alongside by a promise to redo it if the patron isn’t fully happy. On this occasion, the gamble was the large-scale botanical print she proposed for a buyer tub, envisioning it papered as rather a lot as a result of the eaves. “With Brent, it’s simpler for me to be like, ‘Oh my god, don’t be such a brat. Notion me,’” Lyons jokes. Really, her sister ended up adoring it.
Additional typically, the siblings are breezily in sync. After they selected a Damien Hirst spin portray to hold above the household room’s sectional, Winston’s youngsters—11-year-old son Lawson and eight-year-old twin girls Harper and Emory—questioned, “Did a child do this?” The logical subsequent change was to embody the Hirst with the youngsters’ preschool-era artworks, together with three self-portraits, which Winston has recreated as tiny gold pendants.
It’s all of a bit with the household’s philosophy at Hay Fever, a spot the place often gadgets are tossed along with additional helpful ones, and the place dressed-up dinners alternate with run-amok pool events. “There’s solely heaps rather a lot a lot much less growth,” Winston says of the home’s easygoing rhythms. “And far more freedom.”
This story initially appeared all through the September 2024 challenge of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE