HOUSE TOUR | Beautiful Long Island Home Undergoes Total Transformation

on today's episode of homeworthy we're taking you inside decorator Dean Yoder's extraordinary Long Island home Dean and his Husband Jonathan completely revamped the Dutch Colonial home after years of neglect and turned it into the sanctuary of their dreams with a 30-year collection of 18th century Antiquities a surprise awaits you around every corner inside you'll find a full suit of armor a bust of Neptune made out of seashells and everything in between Dean's Keen Eye for design continues outside with Gorgeous Gardens and even a pagoda Style Chicken Coop that transports you to another world but first a big thank you to June's Journey for sponsoring today's home worthy episode hi everyone I'm Allison Kenworthy the founder of homeworthy and thanks so much for watching today I am excited to tell you about June's Journey a murder mystery game that I play on my phone once my two year old is in bed one of the reasons why this game is so fun is because the decor of the Mansion where the game takes place is incredible the rooms are filled with Antiques and vintage furniture which I know you'll also appreciate the game takes place in the 1920s and is full of Glamor June Parker is the stylish star of the game and she's trying to solve the murder of her sister and now I'm in this beautiful parlor and I have to search for Clues look how gorgeous this room is okay I'm searching for the purse does anybody see the purse where's the purse [Applause] where's the lion there's the lion you can download June's Journey for free by clicking the link below in the description or by scanning the QR code on the screen you're watching homeworthy where we believe every home has a story like And subscribe for more hello homeworthy and welcome my name's Dean and I'm Jonathan and this is our home on the North Shore of Long Island that we've lovingly named kippen Hill welcome we're so happy to have you here [Music] foreign [Music] hi I'm Dean Yoder I'm an interior designer and we are in Glen Cove New York and I'm Jonathan Grimm Dean's husband and Welcome to our house yeah and this house is built in 1910 and it's a it was actually a boarding house for women getting out of prison and um so that made it kind of an interesting buy when we found it it had long shag carpet and it was bright red and it was just everything that you'd think of an Institutional type setting and it was ugly ugly ugly it scared us a little bit but it had a lot of wonderful original details to the house we have tried to enhance and improve on yeah we um we closed down the house in 28 days we paid cash for it we got it for a really good deal but it was more money than we had ever spent in our lives and we were kind of scared of it but we were actually really excited by it and I think the thing that really got us going was that we looked in that back window and we saw a kitchen we had this Lilliputian Kitchen in our old house it was like the size of I don't know a Cracker Jack box an eighth of the size of the kitchen yes and when we looked in the back window I saw this kitchen I said my God it goes on forever and ever and ever I never saw a kitchen so big and I think that was one of the at that moment we hadn't even been inside yet and we um decided we had to have it we've been here now 15 years yep yeah and it's um going on 16. going on 16 and we we love it here it's uh this is home this is where they'll take us out I think feet first we met through a dating service that was advertised in the back of the Village Voice called perfect partners and it was a telephone dating service back in the day when you had to make create a telephone voicemail box this was before the internet before the internet very discreetly left little messages back and forth and then we finally met and after that we we dated for a number of years and then we exchanged house keys and I think we rented about three years before we bought our first house together I put a little ad in saying that I love dinner parties collecting antiques decorating and I could build just about anything is what I said and um he didn't I left the way it worked was is you had to leave a little message on a recording there was no video or anything like this so it was all done by voicemail yeah it was done by voicemail and he ignored my first message that I said because I said I lived in Manhattan I lived on the Upper East Side in a little apartment on the Upper East Side and um he lived out in Queens and that was too far for him so he ignored my ad but a couple years well a couple months later a few months I left another ad because he sounded perfect to me on the phone he said he loved gardening which was an absolute must and he liked um quiet dinner parties and he liked we liked just about all the same construction Home Decorating shopping yes pretty much the same things on on every level we could tell we were a match even before we actually talked to each other and I told a friend of mine I said if he's even if he's not just a dog to look at I'll probably marry him and I was pleasantly surprised to say the least welcome to my foyer this room was one of the first rooms Jonathan and I did 15 years ago when we moved into this house we had lots of leftovers when we moved here from doing decorator show houses in that same designer show House I had gone to Newell galleries in New York City and everybody knows their world famous for incredible collection of furniture and this particular table here it's in the gothic style and he had one just like it and I fell in love with it it was um it was exorbitantly expensive it was six figures something beyond anything that I could ever achieve and Jonathan went into his workshop and said I will build it for you and he did he did this entire table from scratch in his Workshop including the gilding and the hand carving he never carved anything in his life before but he he's one of those people that can actually carve anything do anything that he puts his mind to the first time he ever does it I don't know how he does it he's just a genius he always says it's monkey see monkey do and he's that kind of person was this is a suit of armor from um uh it's Juan Carlos V who is actually the king of Spain and this is a replica but it's a what they call a wearable articulated replica it actually bends in every joint I actually had it on it's not comfortable you get a certain feel for how horrible life must have been back then when you had to actually defend your life in one of these things it was not a pleasant experience let's say that anyway this particular piece um we found it um from a dealer down in Palm Beach Florida and uh it actually was in the middle of a divorce situation and the guy said I don't want her to have it and I'm making sure that it goes to some guys who will appreciate it so he sold it to us for a fairly reasonable price and that's how he came and buy came by that you know I had a client years and years ago who was actually she um we had done her foyer completely and it was finished and then she notified me I'm having a feng shui specialist come and critique the work that you did and I said I had no idea that feng shui was part of this anyway she had me um go ahead and listen to her feng shui specialist and she said oh you should have strength in a in a hallway and you failed miserably or whatever I can't remember we had done like water and peace and she was totally into this feeling of things being calm and all that and she said oh you have to have strength in a foyer so anyway I always remembered that and when he appeared in my life I thought that strengthened a foyer it works this is a a painting that came from Jonathan's family his father was actually a general contractor and one of his um uh one of his clients was Park Benet galleries in the city which before it became Sotheby's he was able to get lots of um pieces at very reasonable prices because these would be things that we be passed I've done some research and this is a Viennese piece it's 18th century Jonathan's mother did not like it at all she called him conehead because he had this funny cone-shaped head and she wouldn't allow it to be hung in her house and actually after both of his parents passed away it was one of those things that was on offer between the two kids his sister and he and she's his sister had no interest in it and Jonathan had always liked it and um and I decided that it should go here and actually I kind of he's a little bit late for the suit of armor but I think conehead could have fit inside the suit of armor [Music] so let me go on to the next room here this is one of my favorite rooms it's uh my living room some people call it a drawing room but I'm not that pretentious at least today I came here to a room that was actually a white box there wasn't a stitch of molding in here there was nothing it was actually just red shag carpet there was nothing more to it than that and I ended up um coming into a room that I thought felt was one of the hardest rooms I would ever decorate in my life because it had a door here no door over there there was no symmetry no balance um there was a door here and one here this wall had some symmetry this window is much bigger than the back window and there's not a clear way to actually exit except through that one door so it was a strange living room I had always wanted to collect and I've been collecting for 30 years actually my collection started when I was 16 years old so um but we've been collecting jointly Jonathan and myself for about 30 years all together and we uh I always wanted a French drawing room so this is my interpretation of a French drawing room I only have nine and a half foot ceilings here would have been much better if I had had much bigger ceilings much taller but you live with what you have and you make an intimate room out of it anyway so um what you see here actually all the blasery is something that I built myself I actually did most of the work of all of it myself we got a chop saw and some dikes molding catalogs and um put it all together and uh people think that this is actually a a strange detail that they keep saying how did you do that if you look here this crest rail here um that was actually just out of a Ballard catalog I did a faux um uh Gold Leaf treatment and then I added the paint over top of it it wasn't hard to do but people say how many hours did it take you to paint that there's actually a technique and it's very easy anyway the things in this room are part of a like I said a 30-year collection and there's also family items in here there's things that Jonathan I've collected together um actually one of my favorite stories is right here this desk um this Louis the 16th desk was in my home state of Michigan in Bay City Michigan in a terrible little thrift shop this is actually an 18th century signed link desk and I there was not a thing in this place it must have had probably 220 000 square feet it was a huge place and it had just loads and loads of junk there this is the story that I think makes this make sense Detroit and uh and Bay City Bay City was steering works for General Motors and General Motors had some big Executives that probably could have afforded something like this and then the downturn of the automotive industry and the decimation of most of the major Michigan cities this turned up inside of a thrift shop and um it was the only thing that was any good in the thrift shop and Jonathan I had a rented car at the time and we um it was a little tiny tiny Compact and I couldn't figure out how to get it into the car we were it was one of those things where you it was like Dash and grab grab and dash we actually took it we stuffed it in the back of this car we couldn't get it in and Jonathan got his tools out and he took the trunk off the car completely and put it in the back seat and we put it feet in first to get it in the car we drove away just as fast as we could because they obviously had no idea what they had and to have a signed piece of furniture of this quality is something that I didn't think I would ever be able to afford well I learned something a long time ago and that is you can get actually people the best out of people by having very beautiful things around them I I've heard so many decorators talk about how they want everybody to be comfortable in their home I want people to be comfortable but in a little different way I want them to be feel their very best I want them to feel special in my home and I want them to feel as though they're having a special experience by being here and I get that kind of feedback all the time from my my customers and clients who come here too it's kind of like when you go to the uh to I don't know a Ritz Carlton Hotel where you stay in a holiday in the difference when you go to the Ritz Carlton the whole experience feels incredibly special and and you feel a little bit better about yourself and that's how I like to think of people actually coming here and feeling better about themselves because they're having an experience that they don't get very often um so that's kind of my design philosophy about kind of formality of some rooms I had always had flowers here and um and then all of a sudden a peacock I put him here because of the color and all of a sudden I wouldn't put flowers here ever again this is it so I feel like I've solved a decorating problem it also does this strange thing where it actually separates the spaces just a little bit which I like because we have kind of my writing desk here and then I have the uh the peacock here and it it actually helps to separate the spaces just a little bit I made a delightful seating arrangement here that's actually for six people and we often have six Jonathan likes to keep it eight or under for dinner parties anymore unless we do them out in the garden and so what I find is best is to have comfortable seating for six to eight here we have six really comfortable and then I have some pull-up chairs that um are able to be moved into the space so we can actually have eight here I love Antiquities and it's part of my what I collect personally these are Antiquities they're things this is actually from it's Etruscan it's a berry burial ceremonial figure and uh it's from the second century BC and they're not as uncommon as you might think this particular piece what the way the burials were done was you'd actually have an effigy of a person and you'd actually it would have the head and legs and arms everything it would be somewhat of a replica of that person and you'd actually take the head part at the grave site and you'd snap it off the actual the actual statue and you'd actually take the head and you'd put it into the grave site this would then go home with you as a reminder of the person these are actually not as uncommon as this is this is the real treasure right here it's actually ahead from one of these Antiquities where the heads were not this head was saved somehow and um it's one of my favorite things in the whole house I love this story and I love things that are um actually this is fourth Century BC I think I said second century I I have little notes inside of um these things to actually keep me on track whenever I'm explaining these things to people this is 400 BC so uh fourth Century what I've found I love the most about this property was that the um it came with so much land that we have the space to to uh design and create the gardens that we always wanted to have on a scale that that's very comfortable for us for entertaining and for um just doing pretty much achieving all our dreams uh when we when we bought the property there was a lot of things that had to be removed and things that had to be improved in the way of there were some trees that were dying off and there was a cinder block garage that had to be removed and some driveway area that had to be removed because there was just no Garden space really was really laid out here before I have a funny story about the um the garage we we both hated this garage it was a horrible 50s cinderblock garage that happened to just be built right in the middle of the backyard it didn't make any sense at all and um Jonathan and I we do everything ourselves I mean literally everything and we went out with some sledgehammers we don't usually look like this we went out with sledgehammers and we started removing cinder block by cinderblock and we found the most horrible horrible lost oh my God we are stung pretty bad and um we ended up battling wasps too with fire and all kinds of terrible things well I'm married to a genius and the guy actually can build in anything I don't know and I have to say um we have this funny saying that my dreams are his nightmares because he has to figure out what I'm actually saying and he builds it and he is the most incredible woodworker and plumber and electrician he can do anything we have our general contractors I do the Practical side of of most things and he actually has some pretty good taste too I mean there are times I think that he has no taste whatsoever pick something on my choices sometimes but I I always look for the the like I said The more practical side of things yeah he decorates out of practicality and I'm the Impractical one with the vision right I'm I'm more concerned about the it's durability and its uh functionality and Dean is is always looking for the aesthetic and for the Beauty and the composition and the color and and I leave that to him in most cases we're kind of freaking Frack we work together every day we have for the last we've been together 20 27 going on 28 years and we've worked together from I think almost the very beginning I did have a job where I actually worked for Iris Barrel atfeld who she's um I think she calls herself a geriatric Starlet she really is and um I worked with her for uh well I think five years when I first came to New York in 1988 and um she was uh she was kind of an inspiration for me she was a very interesting person I had never met anybody quite like Iris and I loved her husband Carl what an amazing man just an amazing gentle wonderful soul and knowledgeable he taught me about Fabrics they both did um and there was another guy David Velasco that I met out in California years ago he actually was a guy who um got me interested in interior design when I was 16 years old I bought my first antique from him at an antique show at 16. I was a kooky kid uh let's just say my poor father I grew up Mennonite and my my part of my family is old order Amish anyway to make a long story short my poor father we had a father-son Bible study weekend or something like that and they had all these activities to do with your fathers well there was like the football throw there was all kinds of things like that I sucked at all of it and um but then they had a bed making competition an i1 of course and I feel bad for my father he did not have the jaw for the Sun Dean's still teaching me how to make the bed and puff the pillows he's actually gotten very good at it in the last 27 years I've learned a lot from me he's been a good sport let's just say that this is our winter living room is how I think of this room and then we're going to go out into our side porch which is our summer living room and this is where we spend most of our time this time of the year this is my uh summer porch this is a place where we have people when we um are visiting if you look around there's kind of a theme to this there's actually seashells everywhere we live just less than a mile away from the ocean here and um so it behooved me to actually start to think of this as a place to put things that were related to the Sea and if you look carefully over my shoulder here you'll see there's actually a bust of Neptune who has done in shells Jonathan and I made and there's actually all kinds of C references in some of the pillows if you'll see there's shells and so forth on each of the pillows and stuff in the room and there's a collection of uh seashells from the South Shore actually here that we've actually done over many many years we go to the beach and we come home with whatever little shelves and we just toss them in this is the place you can always find Jonathan is on this particular Chez Lounge she's always there and whenever I can't find him I just come out to this room and he's usually there um if you look here you can see I actually arrange shells and stuff almost like I do florals I actually see them as a thing to actually pay attention to in a Range like a flower design these two again it's all about the same as doing a floral arrangement I think the peacock is my greeter in the living room and here's Zeus and actually I've never heard that comment before Allison but I think you're absolutely right I love to have little greeters into each room and in this room it would be a Neptune and Jonathan I made this from shell collection that we we actually ordered them they come from the Philippines I think and we actually just hot glued this all together it was something I always wanted all my life was to have something like this if you see this is a actually a 19th century telescope that actually was uh probably on a ship and um anything to do with the sea kind of ends up in this room it makes it a happy place for us and it reminds me that we're right by the ocean all right now I want to share with you a little secret it's a door that didn't exist and it's you can't even tell it's there come with me we're on our way to the family room I'm going to show you a little secret that I have here we used to have parties and part of the thing that would happen in this room I play the piano and I would play the American Songbook and people would sit and sing around the piano with me and then we'd want people to exit the room and you had to go that way and it was impossible to get people to flow to work so Jonathan and I sat around one day and we said how about we build a jib door into the wall and we did and so we made the circulation of the whole house work and it's right where is it it's right here welcome to my family room this is where we spend most of our time in the winter time too just the two of us Jonathan and myself and we actually watched TV Behind These doors here I hate to see a TV I suppose all decorators say that and um there's so much in here to talk about and things that I love this is a room that's really warm and cozy and it departs from my Louis XV and 16th collection we go into a much more English feeling room except for this desk here I always wanted a bull desk and I finally got one we actually were up in Cape Cod and we were on vacation during the summer months and uh we wandered into this antique shop there was nothing of any interest to us at all and then I turned the corner and there was this pool desk this is a 19th century version of the 18th century that I so love and um I got it and I can't believe that I own it I have so many moments like that in my life where I can't believe that I have something that I've dreamed about my whole life and that I've been able to acquire um one of the one of those impulse finds that you you get where you absolutely have to have it but you haven't and you buy it without knowing where the heck it's going to go was this painting here it's an over mantle painting and we went into a uh antique shop and we found this and we said oh my gosh uh we have to have it but there's no place for it to go well this was the only wall in the entire house that actually would have held it and uh we're mostly weird awkward windows and doors in every room with very little wall space so even though it looks a little bit oversized for the room it's really the only place we could put it and I think it's quite handsome here I'm happy to have it um this also um this lamp is something that I really love and cherish it's actually a French 19th century lamp and it probably came from a almost Regal residence it's this single pop piece of um glass and um very hard to do in the 19th century this is not molded it's actually ground um and and fashioned out of a much larger piece of glass it's not blown and it's a solid piece and it's been polished using polishing wheels and things this is my bar and as I said before I I was raised in a Mennonite household and we don't drink at all and it was never part of our social life or function and um so what we do is I have a completely stocked bar that has everything you could ever want in it but I don't know the first thing about making a drink so I just point my guests over here and say please help yourself everything there's actually a little refrigerator underneath here and they actually do their own ice and everything and there's nothing that I need to do and I tell them I don't even want to learn to make drinks it's too much effort for me and you you're well capable of doing it yourself so this is the bar [Music] this is the breakfast room and this is where we this is another dream of mine I grew up part of my life in California between Michigan and California um and in California the aesthetic there is all of it was about um 18th century country French French country furnishings and there was almost no examples of English design there the Aesthetics very different and I had always dreamed of having this kind of country French kitchen and I have it it's hard for me to believe and um uh one of my favorite things is this particular um uh cupboard cabinet I have um I collect dishes it's terrible but again we use everything here there's nothing that can't be used and if it gets broken we just buy something else um I have I'm really bad at this I actually have probably I have one two three four five sets of dishes here but I have probably six more in the other room and we use them all we we entertain like mad here almost every weekend we have a dinner party of some sort we have either four people if we if we're only four we usually have it here in the kitchen and it's usually if it's four it's some people we know really well and we're not putting on the dog for them so I make Real Simple food like a stew or something like that or soup something like that but if we're putting on the dog I have everything to do that here too I think you'll find this interesting these dishes here we've actually made several China patterns ourselves Jonathan myself this is one we made which is actually all part of that um uh Seaside theme and every dish is different let me get another one so you can see but everything in every dish is something from the ocean and because we live so close to the ocean these were from Jonathan's family these are all from his mother and she got these by going to the grocery store and buying so much every month and they would give her a plate with a certain amount of purchase and she got him enough for a service for uh 16 and I use those all the time we have a lot of fundraiser dinners here for um for the museum that I'm the president of and we also do things for our Garden Club and we have sit we always have sit-down dinners for those things and we do 20 to 30 and we usually do a tent out in the back for those and we use a different set of china and we usually use it from our own collection we have tons of stuff here to be able to do all that stuff this is where the magic happens I love to cook Jonathan does too Jonathan does almost all the everyday cooking and I do all the big parties and so forth and I like to do a kind of extravagant meals to take all day long and two days to cook so this particular piece here is one of my favorites it was owned by JP Morgan has his stand up on it JPM and actually if you knew I you probably don't know this but where we live here our train stop was actually built by JP Morgan he had his own private train and a private car and it would let him off here with his car they would Park the entire car and um this is where he was and his house was just a few blocks from here it's been since removed and raised but anyway there's things left over from his estate that we have in the house here if you look here this is my stove I couldn't believe I had a stove like this when we moved in we collected all these rocks and all the refuse that we found in the backyard and I said to go ahead and um make this I wanted to do this backsplash that looked you know primitive in country and so these are just collected rocks out of the back yard and Jonathan was the one who actually put this together for me and I also needed some an immersion wand so I could make soups and stuff on the stove so I covered that particular outlet with a rock and you don't even see it I had a Mennonite grandmother and when my father passed away I was able to get one of the few things that I got out of my father's estate was this incredible cookbook and um it was from the 1930s and this gives a little peek into what women actually did for their families back then it has this wonderful incredible idea of what a Christmas dinner might be oyster cocktails and green pepper shells who would have ever eaten that I don't know and it also showed her how to set tables for every kind of luncheon every formal dinner uh how to have a coffee it was kind of this amazing little thing and it actually it keeps my grandmother close to me I lost her when I was five years old so I remember her but just Snips and bits and I think of her my mother always said she was the quintessential housewife and that she was actually the best of the best and that she was so skilled in being able to run a household and I think that that was pretty typical of most Mennonite women anyway so I this is the way I kind of keep her close to me I love this book now I'm going to take you into my dining room that's where the magic happens this is actually the room that we actually depend upon for our business because almost every client we have ever had came from a dinner party either directly or indirectly so this is the money maker of a house [Music] welcome to the dining room um this is the place that's very special it's a nighttime room there the whole front of the house is really nighttime rooms they're actually meant to be seen and viewed at night they're very cozy and if you look here this actually kind of uh this whole area kind of is the whole theme behind this room it's elegant dining meat domes things like that we do French service we do Russian service here when we have clients and friends and family and this here I love this this is actually an old church door it actually was part of some big cupboard or something we don't know exactly what's going on here but we know it's about food and if you look here we call this the potato chip tree we don't know exactly what kind of tree it is but if you look in all these baskets there are these little leaves and every one of them has are full of these leaves here and if you look here on this side this man is blessing them and they're it looks like they're fermenting them somehow and this woman is drinking out of a Yore and so we think it's probably some kind of a alcohol um making scene there's an allegory to this obviously we've just never had anybody that could actually tell us exactly what this is but we know it's an allegory about food and it kind of goes with our room if you look at the ceiling we did the ceiling to Chisholm Castle in England has a ceiling much like this and we copied this Jonathan and I made this and this particular light that you see here came from from the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City it was something that Jonathan's father removed from one of the hotels he was he was a general contractor and he he worked at redoing some of the hotels in downtown New York I collect Continental silver it's an 800 silver it's not as quite as pure as English silver or the French silver which is the purest of all this is German silver and it's in the Rococo taste and I just love this stuff if you look carefully to The Backs if you see these Forks are turned upside down and so are the spoons and it's because whoever had commissioned this bit of silver actually had enough money to show off that they could afford to have both sides decorated and that was a sign of a very wealthy person and if you look carefully you can see that they had it initialed with their with their monogram and then on the back you see that the back is actually been decorated as well showing that this particular client had enough money to both sides decorated when you come into this room there's always a greeter as I was point it was pointed out to me and the greeter in this room is our parrot um and the room here was actually done in my two favorite colors which are teal and uh green and they actually I did a an Empire stripe and I striped this myself with just blue painters tape and uh put this together it it actually marries the rooms together too because if you see our front entry hose the same green and the living room and also our tea room which is right off of this room have the same colors and this is kind of an in-between room and I had to do something that married all the three four rooms together and so that was partially what I had done to get this to work we are somewhat formal people and I do enjoy the formality of things it's a it's a nice way to live I think we don't have Kit chill children and that's kind of a blessing in this kind of a home because we don't have to worry about things being broken or anything like that and again we're very easy on it nothing matters as far as if it gets broken we'll buy something new there's so many things to collect in this world so next we're going to go into our tea room tea is served here on the weekends only at four o'clock and uh Saturday or Sunday usually not both days but this is when Dean and Jonathan are tired from working in the garden or working on a project in the house and we want to have people over but we don't want to have a big dinner party we have four o'clock tea and it only lasts for about two to two and a half hours and it's a wonderful way to catch up with friends and to be able to have a short visit well these beautiful Gates that you're looking at here are actually remnants they're actually French Gates I actually had them in my garden in my other home and then one day when we were just moving in here I took a measurement and they were exactly a perfect fit for here if you look there's actually a key slot in one of these I can't remember where Jonathan knows where it's at but it's down below here someplace and we noticed that it was cut right here at the bottom so these Gates were probably like eight or ten feet tall um but we bought them as these fragment remnants and we love them just the way they are and I think they work spectacularly as this entry to this special room inside of here actually this was I always wanted zubair wallpaper couldn't afford it but I actually ended up with this um painted by Two Worlds out of New York City and a nice lady I can't remember her name they're out of business now I believe but um they used to do several projects for me I furniture for clients and so forth over the years and we had done so much business together back in the 90s and 2000s that one day she said I have this it was returned by a customer they it didn't fit their needs would you like to purchase it and she offered it to me about half the price that she would have given it to anybody else and it's made quite the theme for this room uh you know tea is also an Asian um beverage brought To Us by the English and I love collecting silver this is all Sterling this is actually Georgian silver and it is uh kind of my pride and joy I just love I actually have a continental service in the living room that's much bigger but this is the one we use the most often most of the rooms are set up all ready to go I have sugar in here the biscuits are not in here this is a this is an Irish biscuit box and I love the etching on it I just think it's beautifully done Jonathan found this at an antique shop and I've been in love with it ever since I just love the little masks and so forth on it and all the chasing like I say it's a lazy visit so I actually just pop over to the pastry shop and we'll have macaroons and we'll have baby napoleons and uh French Tarts and things like that and I will make some uh cucumber sandwiches and things like that almost always I'll also make uh egg salad as well and we make this as a very quick little gathering place to for us to share a few uh stories with our best friends [Music] we're on our way upstairs to the rooms where the private life takes place it's really not private up there I'm just making stuff up this painting was done by a friend a very good friend of mine Johnny Monteleone and he is a very incredible painter and he does an allegory here that actually is all about his search for his for a faith um he is an agnostic of sorts and his mother was actually Catholic and she was one of the kinds of Catholics that went to mass four or five times a week she's very devoted and he painted this painting and it's called the known it's about a man who has actually died the man here that we see he's dead it's symbolized by the closed watch if you look carefully there's this um pocket watch that's closed and you see these two women who are holding him back they don't want him to go he's walking through a portal which is actually in the shape of a headstone and he says this is the last moment that he and his mother actually agree upon everything Beyond this is something they disagree about she thinks that this man's going to heaven or to a hell and he believes that this is probably the end of all that exists in the world and he painted this painting to it's a tribute to his mother and his struggle about religion and I thought it was an amazing painting it was given to us as a gift by him after the competition it won an honorable mention I believe and Jonathan I had done the knowing the story behind it we in our Workshop we created the frame which is the headstone we are now at one of my favorite things in the whole house these this was something that was done during covet and if you see the little squirrel here and The Little Owl we found a Carver in Russia of all places and we gave told him what we wanted and he did these for us um he The Little Owl is saying good night to us when we go to bed at night and the little squirrel greets Us in the day and uh they're all made of out of white oak and they were made to match even the species of wood to the original railings that were here we also did a rampant line which is down here lower and symbolizing an English manor house which this is not we're playing games here this is our Grand Illusion is what I like to say and here what I have is this beautiful verdur tapestry which is from the 17th century it's something that I always wanted if you looked in the living room on the on the um little canopy in there there's a couple of little verdur tapestry pillows and there's also um another one on one of the tables and then there's this one and if you look there's this beautiful bird and there's a castle in the background it's a little faded but it's right here there's a castle in the background this was something that we we bought online probably I don't know 15 years ago maybe more yeah it was in our old house so it's probably almost 20 years ago now just love this one of my favorite things in the house this room got its nickname the Jane Austen room from a friend of ours who's a fellow decorator Eric liesdahl every time he would stay here in this room he'd say I feel like I'm living in a Jane Austen uh book anyway so we now uh you know we refer to it as a Jane Austen room we love to Pretend We're pretentious but we're really not this is a fabric that was actually sold to bunny melon and I was able to purchase a yard of it I won't even tell you the price of it it is something that most people would faint to think that they would spend that kind of money on anyway I I was able to get it's actually a half a yard and I'm very lucky to have it it's starting to fray a little bit at the edges but I'll never change it I can't believe that I have such a thing in my house most of this furniture came from a very special house here in Long Island called Knoll and they were taking the house of part and Christie's or Sotheby's I don't remember they were act they had an auction and we were actually at the auction we bought the bed we bought the the um uh chest of drawers and curio there we bought some other pieces as well this bed I wanted to show you Jonathan and I did the canopy for it and we turned these little bells they were actually little wooden they were little Planters and we made them into bells and we uh we actually decided to call this bed the Virgin keeper because if it shakes too much the bells will ring [Music] Welcome to our bedroom this is the room where we Slumber and uh Jonathan and I watch TV in here this is um this is a special room it has uh so many things that we both love and things from both of our families if you look this little Coronet over the bed that was actually some draperies that I had made for a project for my family and it ended up here in the end um the uh this is actually a Venetian headboard it's all water guilt it's 18th century it's a beautiful thing I can't believe that I get to sleep underneath something like this every night makes me happy we also have these 18th century tapestry pillows here so the room has some of our favorite colors in it this soft heel it's actually really really restful color for us and backed by a color they say never to use a bedroom which is red we have red in almost every room in this house this is actually a piece that Jonathan made I designed it and actually I designed and had it two of them made a his and hers for one of my clients in New York City in their master bedroom and um I said how much extra work would it be for you to make another one for us and he said no it's the same amount of work and my husband who didn't know how to carve a thing carved all this carved all this he carved the feet carved every bit of this I had done some AutoCAD drawings of the actual piece of furniture and then he actually built it um very proud of him one of the things I used to work for Stickley Furniture many years ago oh probably 20 years ago now and actually they are known for their um beautiful drawer slides they have three wooden drawer slides for every drawer and I did four on these and they work even better than the strictly version which was the gold standard um Jonathan's built lots of furniture for our home one of the other things I wanted to point out too is this beautiful Charles III um Georgian Eagle console table and it's a it's really a very special piece it's 18th century English and it's really I can't believe we have it very lucky to have it and we have this incredible painting it's a Willard Metcalf who was part of the American impressionist movement here in uh the United States his work hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we happen to have one of his paintings it's a wood scene he has other scenes that are brighter and more colorful but this is really dark in evocative of the beautiful beautiful Upstate Woods that you would find he was he painted here in New York state and I just love this painting it makes me very happy [Music] foreign and this is where we have lots of other intimate dinner parties we have lots of dinner parties here at this house and we have other places on the property we have dinner parties in other kitchens as well so here I have a little bit of Palazzi Majolica and also these this is more of that set of dishes that Jonathan and I made um for a show not too long ago again that tropical theme and again we're near the near the water and if you look carefully once everything is about the ocean here we had a problem with this part of the house our watering system we didn't have drip irrigation on everything and so we decided we would be the lazy gardeners that we can be we actually did all succulents and Cactus up here on this part of the garden and these are all things that need very little water we do have a couple of espaliated apple trees or I mean what they call columnar apple apple trees here too and we actually have those on drip so that they actually don't get neglected for water but this was a way to start a new collection and we I think it works really beautifully to have all these succulents as part of the garden out here thank you [Music] this clematis is really doing something special for us today I didn't expect it to be so In Bloom it's really beautiful when we moved here this is where there was actually a huge um garage right where we're standing in the middle of this uh Fountain and Jonathan and I rented a backhoe and we dug out the fountain ourselves and we laid all the cinder blocks and we made this fountain come on let's go to the greenhouse this is our Greenhouse this is uh Lord and Burnham Greenhouse it actually came from a famed Whitney estate and a friend of ours gave us a phone call and said they're going to decommission three of the greenhouses you can have one as long as you provide some insurance and I jumped at this uh thought of it and we ended up putting this in our van one little piece at a time it was 60 by 100 when we got it and we actually made it much smaller so it would be something we could manage and Jonathan I rebuilt it here on the property about seven years ago and so this is uh something we always dreamed of having and we have it again it was 60 by 100 we it's now about 20 by 25 and it's a size that we can actually manage ourselves and pay for all the heat during the winter but one of the most magical things about this is in the winter time when actually it's snowing and it's just awful out we'll come out here we have the heat up to about 75 degrees and we're in Florida actually most of the Tropicals that are in the yard come back into here this is it in its most empty state right now and uh it actually is just went uh summering over with fewer plants right now it's much more dramatic in the in the winter [Music] next I'm going to take you to our Asian Garden we call it an Asian Garden because it's not really Japanese and it's not Chinese it's just blank Asia this is actually where our chickens live our chickens are no more though because they passed away during covet they were in their 20s they lived to be about 20 to 25 years old and ours got about 21 we think that's about their age we're now in the Asian Garden and as I said before the the Asian Garden is a loose fitting term because it's neither Chinese nor Japanese it's our interpretation of an Asian Garden this is actually the oldest tree on the property we think it was built it was actually placed here at the time the property was built in 1910 it's actually a Boulevard Cypress and there's actually a botanical name on there which I won't bore you with thank you as I said before this is where we a house we built for our chickens and chickens are actually Asian animals we didn't know that until we did a little research and uh turns out they were actually originated from um East the Far East and so we had to build them up Pagoda to live in and we try and do things sort of according to Asian gardens here if you see this tree has been made into what they call clouds and we we trim this every year in order to be able to make it look the way it does it's high maintenance but it's very pretty I think if you look at the Pagoda we actually went to Chinatown and we actually found this is a Moongate window and we we made this and then we made it into a Dutch door so it opens like this well this is our White garden and EV as most people know sissinghurst was the home of the first White garden and this is kippen Hill's little miniaturized version of a white Garden if you see we have lots of Annabelle hydrangeas and we have white tipped hostas everything in this Garden is white including these Wisteria that actually bloom in the springtime everything has a bit of a season here there's some lilies here that are just about ready to bloom there they didn't give decide to give their show yet and these are all white lilacs that are actually are past Bloom now this is one of our perennial beds and uh we love roses Jonathan absolutely adores roses and these are simple knockout roses but we found them to be the most fluoriferous and the most reliable rose that we can actually find they are coming out with new varieties all the time um this yellow yarrow is a good performer for us we've just finished up with alliums we had some really wonderful allium displays out here you can still see some of the seed heads which I think are really remarkable I love these seed heads I don't take them off until well after they're done blooming because they're so pretty I love the structure of them but when they're actually in full bloom they're these giant Globes of purple so what I what do I like best about the house well you know what it's a really comfortable house to entertain in I love to have people around much more than my husband here he he he could be a loner forever but me I have to have people I just am a magnet I have to have people and um so much to histogram we have people over all the time and I just love when we have people that are willing to spend the weekend with us stay the night we get to cook together we get to um laugh and joke maybe build a fire um it just makes me feel like that's the whole purpose of our of our home this is a place that I share with the world I actually have um I'm the president of a Garden Club and we have 30 ladies and some gentlemen who actually come regularly to this house and they see it as almost a place that's theirs too and that's how I like to have them think about it so I love this house because we get to entertain and in so many different ways like we have and you get to decorate yeah we get to decorate a lot a lot of rooms we actually own the house next door to which we made into our guest house and um that house between this house and that house we have 10 bedrooms and between this house I think it's like 34 rooms that we've gotten to decorate and you counted chairs one time how many chairs we have in this I have a hundred and I feel like I'm confessing a sin I have 144 chairs in this house there's plenty of places to sit down yes and I collect chairs I'm an auctioneers dream they have a single chair in my hand and my paddle goes up and I have to have one [Music] thanks for watching for more homeworthy worthy or like And subscribe

Channel: Homeworthy

Views: 228,510

Keywords: home, house, home tour, house tour, traditional design, interior design, interior designer, long island, new york, homeworthy, quintessence, AD, veranda, elle decor, gardens, beautiful, home decor, decor

Id: HVzkZhKCJBE

Length: 58min 45sec (3525 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023