Jewelry designer Brent Neale Winston remembers her first visit to Hay Fever, a stately three-story home in Locust Valley, New York. Oversized antique hinges graced the front door of the 1668 property. Inside, the color palette was more adventurous, just as the previous owner, interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber, had envisioned. She was blown away. “Anything with beautiful metal pieces, anything that uses color in an interesting way, whether it’s a box, a bowl or a jar, I’m always drawn to that,” Winston says.
The sisters combined an antique dining table with chairs they inherited from their parents and reupholstered 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.
It was summer 2019 and the house was for sale, but the designer and her husband, Michael Winston, who works in real estate, weren’t ready to commit to a weekend retreat for their young family. “He’s a city mouse,” she says of his initial hesitation. Months later, as the pandemic upended the normal order of things, the Long Island hideaway – on two verdant acres, improbably located in the middle of the city – came back to her mind. She and her husband were also drawn to the property’s irresistible name: Hay Fever, named by the previous owners, the Hay family, after a Noël Coward play.
The couple made an offer and moved in in June 2020. They felt comfortable in the convivial atmosphere of the place, which had previously served as an inn and Quaker school. “I don’t know if that sounds a bit esoteric,” says Winston, “but it just has a wonderful energy.”
A Jane Churchill-skirted bench wraps around one corner of the living room. The tables are by CB2, the cushions are in a Pierre Frey pattern and the rug is by Stark.
Four years later, Hay Fever has evolved into its latest incarnation: vibrant and playfully elegant, just like Winston himself.”Layered is always (the word) — it’s about how she dresses, how she wears her jewelry,” says Ramsey Lyons, the project’s Pittsburgh-based interior designer, who happens to be Winston’s older sister. The weekend home is their first full-scale collaboration, facilitated by a shared aesthetic shaped by their eclectic upbringing in Baltimore.
Tour this historic Long Island home
The task before them – transforming an already photogenic home to suit its new residents – was in some ways a no-brainer for Winston. With her jewelry brand Brent Neale, she is often asked to rework a client’s heirloom stone into a custom piece, maintaining continuity while accentuating individual charm.
The sisters tackled the master bedroom first. The dramatic scarlet damask on the walls disappeared; instead, an airy quadrille wallpaper with a tree and topiary motif now adorns the towering ivy apples in the garden outside. This first transformation was exciting, says Winston: “It feels like a garment is being tailored to fit you.”
The library’s bookshelves are painted in the Sultan’s Palace style by Benjamin Moore and the antique table is from the David Duncan Studio. The armchairs are by McGuire, the rug is by Stark and the ceiling wallpaper is by Schumacher.
Pattern play is omnipresent throughout the house. “I love exaggerated moments,” says Winston. The late Mario Buatta is not just a lodestar of maximalism: A pair of the interior designer’s lacquer chairs, sourced from Eerdmans in Manhattan, sit in the living room next to a striped sofa, zebra-print armchairs and textured floral curtains against pale aquamarine walls. The volume is turned up even further in the adjacent library, where built-in shelves are painted a high-gloss lipstick pink; tortoiseshell wallpaper on the ceiling and an antelope-print rug act as idiosyncratic neutrals.
For Lyons, every project requires at least a leap of faith, backed by a promise to do it again if the client isn’t satisfied. In this case, the gamble was the large-scale botanical print she proposed for a guest bathroom, imagining it would be wallpapered to the eaves. “With Brent, it’s easier for me to say, ‘Oh my God, don’t be such a brat. Trust me,'” Lyons jokes. Of course, her sister ended up loving it.
More often, though, the siblings are on the same wavelength. When they chose a Damien Hirst Spin painting to hang above the living room sectional, Winston’s children – 11-year-old son Lawson and eight-year-old twin girls Harper and Emory – wondered, “Did a child do that?” The logical next step was to surround the Damien Hirst painting with the children’s artwork from their preschool years, including three self-portraits that Winston recreated as small gold pendants.
That fits in perfectly with the family’s philosophy at Hay Fever, a place where everyday objects are thrown together with more precious things and where fancy dinners alternate with wild pool parties. “There’s just a lot less structure,” says Winston of the relaxed rhythm of the house. “And a lot more freedom.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
