SOUND SOLUTIONS

AN ARCHITECT, A CLIENT, A BUILDER AND AN INTERIOR DESIGNER RETHINK A 1916 GREENWICH HOME.

- J. MICHAEL WELTON

In 1916, yachting enthusiast Henry Steers purchased the land for his second home, on the banks of Long Island Sound. A U-shaped affair, it was sited on six-acres in the Byram Shore section of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Steers passed away at the home in 1928, but it stayed in the family until the mid1950s. More recently though, the once-grand home was listing toward dereliction. Its pink stuccoed exterior and worn-out interiors could only be called down at the heels. It was bland, dated—and untouched for years.

Enter Charles Hilton, of the Greenwich architecture firm that bears his name. A Classicist of the first order, he was hired to rethink the home’s look, inside and out. “The new exterior style initially was envisioned in a Mediterranean aesthetic with a barrel-tile roof,” he says. “But it was ultimately executed to resemble an English or Irish country house with a new, flat, terracotta tile roof.”

Then Hilton’s work ground to a halt; eventually the house would change hands. When a Filipino couple with four children from Westchester County became its new residents in 2018, they began to articulate a new vision for the home, inside and out.

Their first call was to a contractor who suggested they contact Hilton. “We met with him and he made recommendations,” says the client, a stay-at-home mom whose husband works in finance in New York. “We said: ‘Wow—you really know the house and the area’—and that’s how we ended up with him.”