These special pieces, together with other one-of-a-kind objets d’art and decorative elements, come together in a way that’s rather poetic: There’s the nostalgia of classic floral prints and antique Persian rugs, coupled with the mystique of chandeliers in outlandish shapes, and a smattering of completely unexpected little nooks, including a pantry painted head-to-toe carmine red. “The home has a very moody quality,” says Caillier. “Some of it recalls British country interiors, with rooms all one color, including the ceiling and trim, and lots of details and coziness.” It’s an apropos likeness, given that her client used to live in the UK and spent time in the Cotswolds, that achingly beautiful stretch of countryside dotted with picturesque stonewalled manors. Yet even as it pays tribute to certain old-world aesthetic traditions, this home is clearly the product of modern—and quite ingenious—minds. Leave it to Caillier to take wall art to new heights, commissioning a dining room mural whose pastoral motifs—painted by James Mobley and inspired by the area’s woodlands—extend into the ceiling like climbing ivy. The room, which has a quiet palette of dusty blues and grayish taupes, is connected through arched doorways to the kitchen on one end and the living room at the other. While there’s a direct line of vision between these three common areas, and chromatically they are not dissimilar, each space has its own personality. It’s fair to say that no inch of the 7,500-square-foot home was an afterthought.
This is, after all, where DeCourcy now lives full time, with frequent visits from her adult daughter, Emma, and son-in-law, Jason. “I did not want it to feel like a new home,” says DeCourcy. “I wanted it to be multilayered, like it had been assembled over time.” For a decade, mother and daughter spent their summers together in a converted 1863 barn on Shelter Island, and so in the process of moving to a new construction, DeCourcy did not want her family to “feel uprooted.” Outdoors, too, she wanted the four-acre property to have a sense of heritage. She hired local garden designer Charlie Marder to rewild the landscape, which had been cleared during construction, adding pine, elm, ginkgo, and magnolia trees.
Once the renovations were finished (well, almost—Caillier is getting ready to work on the property’s lower level), DeCourcy became especially fond of lingering in the library, a room enveloped in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves painted in Farrow & Ball’s Salon Drab, a cosseting chocolate brown, and furnished the way an old study would be if it belonged to an über-stylish academic. Nineteenth-century-inspired armchairs from London’s Jamb, upholstered in a plaid wool fabric with a thick velvet trim, stand next to a large green ottoman and a vintage floor lamp with a wicker shade.
