This Historic Home Used to Be a Quaker School. Now It’s a Riot of Pattern and Personality
The jewelry designer Brent Neale Winston remembers the first time she paid a visit to Hay Fever, a stately three-story house in Locust Valley, New York. Oversize antique hinges adorned the front door to the property, which dates to 1668. Inside, the palette skewed adventurous, as envisioned by its previous owner, the interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber. She was smitten. “Anything with beautiful hardware, anything that uses color in an interesting way, whether it be a box or a bowl or a glass, I’m always drawn to that,” Winston says.
It was the summer of 2019, and the home was on the market, but the designer and her husband, Michael Winston, who works in real estate investment, were not ready to commit to a weekend retreat for their young family. “He’s a city mouse,” she says of his early hesitation. Months later, as the pandemic upended the normal order of things, the Long Island hideaway—set on two verdant acres improbably nestled in the center of town—floated back to mind. She and her husband were also drawn to the property’s irresistible moniker, Hay Fever, named by earlier owners, the Hay family, after a Noël Coward play.
The couple made an offer and moved in by June 2020, finding comfort in the convivial spirit of the place, which had previously served as an inn and a Quaker school. “I don’t know whether this sounds a little woo-woo,” Winston says, “but it just has a wonderful energy about it.”
Four years later, Hay Fever has blossomed into its latest incarnation: vivid and playfully elegant, much like Winston herself. “Layered is always [the word]—it’s how she dresses, it’s how she styles her jewelry,” says Ramsey Lyons, the Pittsburgh-based interior designer on the project, who happens to be Winston’s older sister. The weekend home marks their first full-scale collaboration, eased by a shared aesthetic informed by their eclectic Baltimore upbringing.
The Homeowner and the Designer
Brent Neale Winston (right) on the front steps of her 17th-century home in Locust Valley, New York, which she redecorated with help from her interior designer sister, Ramsey Lyons (left). Both are wearing Valentino.
Living Room
The living room is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Palladian Blue above the chair rail and Stratton Blue below it. The custom sofa is in a Schumacher stripe, and the armchair is in a Pierre Frey fabric. The rug is by Stark and artwork by Larry Zox.
Library
The bookshelves are painted in Benjamin Moore’s Sultan’s Palace, and the antique table is from David Duncan Studio. The armchairs are by McGuire, the rug is by Stark, and the ceiling paper is by Schumacher.
Kitchen
The house was previously owned by the acclaimed interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber, and the decor in some rooms, like the kitchen, was left intact. Pale green shelves now hold Winston’s collection of 1950s yellow cabbage majolica.
Dining Room
The sisters paired an antique dining table with chairs handed down from their parents, reupholstering the seats in a Pierre Frey fabric. The rug is from Nashville Rug Gallery, the wallpaper is by Pierre Frey, and the artwork is by Jason Bereswill.
Dining Room
A built-in cabinet’s red interior, also a Bilhuber holdover, now displays the owner’s collection of blue glassware and ceramics.
Family Room
A skirted banquette in a Jane Churchill fabric wraps around a corner of the family room. The tables are by CB2, the pillows are in a Pierre Frey pattern, and the rug is by Stark.
Primary Bedroom
A Quadrille print envelops this bedroom, with window valances to match. The bedding is by Matouk, the armchairs are by Mecox in a Lisa Fine fabric, and the floor lamp is by Meg Braff.
Primary Bathroom
The cabinets and moldings in Jamestown Blue by Benjamin Moore contrast with a delicate and airy wallpaper by Schumacher. The vintage vase is by McCoy.
Girls’ Bedroom
The bed canopies are in a Schumacher fabric, the wallcovering is by Pierre Frey, and the lamps are by Visual Comfort & Co.
Guest Bathroom
The wallpaper is by Pierre Frey, the chair is vintage, the curtains are in a Schumacher fabric, and the towel is by Matouk.
Garden
The family loves to entertain in the garden. The tablecloth is by Julia Amory, and the plates and tableware are by Talmaris Paris.
Pool
In back of the house, a garden with trimmed boxwood hedges leads to a gunite pool with bluestone coping.
Exterior
The 17th-century clapboard home is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The task before them—to remake an already photogenic house to wholly suit its new inhabitants—was, in a way, second nature to Winston. With her fine-jewelry brand, Brent Neale, she is often asked to reset a client’s heirloom stone into a custom creation, preserving continuity while leaning into individual charm.
The sisters first set their sights on the primary bedroom. Out went the high-drama scarlet damask on the walls; in its place, an airy Quadrille paper with a tree-and-topiary motif now echoes the towering cones of ivy in the garden outside. That initial transformation was a thrill, Winston says: “It starts to feel like a piece of clothing being tailored to you.”
Pattern play is a constant throughout the house. “I love an over-the-top moment,” Winston says. The late Mario Buatta isn’t just a maximalist lodestar: A pair of the decorator’s lacquer chairs, sourced from Eerdmans in Manhattan, communes in the living room with a striped sofa, zebra-print armchairs, and structured floral curtains set against pale aquamarine walls. The volume is cranked up in the adjacent library, where 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, every project is likely to have at least one leap of faith, helped along by a promise to redo it if the client isn’t pleased. In this instance, the gamble was the large-scale botanical print she proposed for a guest bath, envisioning it papered up to the eaves. “With Brent, it’s easier for me to be like, ‘Oh my god, don’t be such a brat. Trust me,’” Lyons jokes. Of course, her sister ended up adoring it.
More often, the siblings are breezily in sync. When they chose a Damien Hirst spin painting to hang above the family room’s sectional, Winston’s children—11-year-old son Lawson and eight-year-old twin girls Harper and Emory—wondered, “Did a kid do that?” The logical next move was to surround the Hirst with the kids’ preschool-era artworks, including three self-portraits, which Winston has recreated as tiny gold pendants.
It’s all of a piece with the family’s philosophy at Hay Fever, a place where everyday items are tossed together with more precious ones, and where dressed-up dinners alternate with run-amok pool parties. “There’s just a lot less structure,” Winston says of the house’s easygoing rhythms. “And a lot more freedom.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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