hamptons cottages & Gardens
A Feathered nest
There was always an extra pair of eyes in sight as work progressed outside and inside of this house in Snedens Landing. The dwelling was already part of a fairy tale–like enclave of century-old houses, each distinctive and quirky in shape and style, situated high above the Hudson River on the rocky Palisades. But whenever interior designer John Ferguson arrived to measure rooms, or when the restoration architect Nate McBride was there to assess his new floor plan, or when the homeowner drove the half hour north from her law firm in lower Manhattan to the house, that other set of eyes belonging to a resident peacock was there to greet them. “I will tell you that during every site meeting, we might be on the second floor discussing the dry wall going up in an empty room and there he would be, the blue-feathered peacock on the scaffolding outside looking through the window,” says Ferguson. “Or he’d be on the Juliette balcony off the primary bedroom or on a table in the yard or sitting on my car when it was time for me to head back.” As for the two neighborly peacocks, homeowner Cathy Martin says, “They’re both very gentle and tame, but now that its shedding season, the yard is filled with their beautiful blue feathers.”
McBride likens the dwelling and its setting to a children’s book. “When you arrive, it’s like a Hobbit house,” he says. “It’s part of a magical, happy fairy tale, with peacocks walking around who live next door, and even the way it’s sited on the stone ledges of the Palisades.”
Both Ferguson and McBride were instantly captivated by the storybook quality of the house, an atmosphere they both found inspiring for what they needed to accomplish for the client. When Martin purchased the property in 2018, she was smitten with the existing structure and was immediately aware, too, of its even greater potential.
“Before Nate did his architectural transformation, you’d walk into the house and then right into another wall. It was claustrophobic. You had no feeling that a beautiful vista was just outside.” McBride’s first task was to demolish a series of interior walls, especially at the entry, to allow the full panorama of the river to come into focus upon entering. “The first time I walked in,” he recalls, “I asked myself, ‘Why can’t I see the river?’ That view didn’t exist before the changes.”
Once the architectural work was done, which also involved raising a roof and creating dormers to transform empty loft space into two bedrooms and a bath, Ferguson’s role was to furnish the rooms. He preserved the home’s original exterior blue window trim, “ironically called peacock-blue,” he emphasizes but introduced a variety of blues, reds, and greens inside. “I love saturated colors and dramatic fabrics,” he says. “Few clients will allow that, and while Cathy’s original palette at her former apartment was very traditional, she also didn’t mind color and patterns.”
“Like John, I like the color a lot, but he has a sense of scale and detail that goes way beyond mine,” says Martin.
Among the distinctive elements Ferguson designed in the already architecturally unique home was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the family room, with its vertical elements offset as a way to establish added texture and form. He applied Farrow & Ball’s Blue Gray to numerous walls for its uncanny ability to assume multiple shades as the day progresses, and he chose the brand’s vibrant Stiffkey Blue for a transitional hallway upstairs. “I love the effect of going from a strong dark color like that into a bedroom bright with natural light,” he says. The Snedens Landing site reminds Ferguson of his native England. “It’s possibly my favorite area in the entire metropolitan region,” he says of the enclave, long famous as a haunt of bohemian celebrities and writers when it first evolved. “It’s mystical. When it rains, the cliffs on which the house sits become waterfalls; there’s often fog, a mistiness. The house feels as if it’s been here forever.” Indeed, the house is a true-to-life fairy tale that endures.
