This Former Quaker School Is Now 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.

a dining room with a white oblong table and chairs with turquoise patterned fabric seats, fireplace with decorative tiles inset and white mantel with two lamps on top and an artwork above, built in arched cabinet

Pernille Loof

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.

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.”

family room with wood paneled walls, two windows with half curtains on bottom, built in banquette with skirt and colorful accent pillows, a chair and two round tripod tables, child's framed artwork in wall

Pernille Loof

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.

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 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.

“I love an over-the-top moment.” —Brent Neale Winston

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.”

a library with magenta bookshelves holding books and small pictures, shaded sconces attached to shelves, round wood pedestal table with three rattan chairs with print cushions, wallpapered ceiling

Pernille Loof

The library’s 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 by Schumacher.

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.

bathroom with a deep white bathtub and white towel, curved back wood chair with rush seat, whimsical wallpaper with aqua background and colorful leaves, vines, and sea creatures, window with white curtain

Pernille Loof

The wallpaper in the guest bathroom is by Pierre Frey, the chair is vintage, the curtains are in a Schumacher fabric, and the towel is by Matouk.

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.”