The Edelman blue leather chair, hand-knotted wool rug and lacquered linen cylinder cocktail table are designed and custom made by John Lyle Design.
In 1819, Phoebe Lay traveled from Connecticut to Montgomery, New York, pursuing a teaching post at the town’s prestigious Montgomery Academy. She knocked on the door of academy trustee Isaac Jennings, who informed her that the institution did not hire married ladies. Miss Phoebe replied that she was not married. Shortly after hiring her, to Miss Phoebe’s surprise, Jennings proposed marriage.
The following year, Jennings bought them a circa 1790 house in the town center, tacked on an addition with a porch out back, and the couple settled into comfortable domesticity. When designer John Lyle and his husband, Edwin Monell –also a teacher, wouldn’t you know – came upon this residence almost 200 years later, the Mississippi-born Lyle describes, “It rang a lot of bells for me, having grown up in the South with antebellum homes.”
It was in good condition but nevertheless held some surprises. Installing a tub in the primary bath taught Lyle “the limits of our hot water system.” The couple also found jail cells downstairs (likely remnants of pre-Jennings owners who devoted two rooms to legal offices). Lyle gutted the kitchen and opened it to a den, installed mahogany ceilings under the porch roof, added aubergine shutters to the exterior and designed a new neoclassical-style railing for the front steps.
But the biggest surprise was an explosion of color unleashed by Lyle during the renovation. He began sedately enough in the living room by wrapping the walls in a beige silk and painting the ceiling in a darker, but still neutral, lacquered shade. The furnishings were monochromatic, save for a blue leather chair he designed. The only hint of flamboyance was the blue floor, but it peeked out discreetly from around a tame custom rug. “That was to be the direction,” he recalls. “But it quickly evolved – or devolved – from there.” Whatever your perspective, you won’t question Lyle when he notes the rooms “are certainly no shrinking violet.”
The entry hall sets the tone, with walls painted a deeply saturated Arsenic green from Farrow & Ball, the floor, a custom-blended French blue. “I wanted a ‘pow,’ not something I’ve seen everywhere else,” Lyle explains. That’s what he got, not only with the mesmerizing base colors but also through large-scale artworks whose unapologetic palettes burst off the walls, as well as an arresting mix of antiques (an Empire chandelier and chair) and contemporary pieces (a sleek longitudinal bookcase by Lyle of polished stainless steel and Lucite).
“I like edgy and artsy,” he explains of his approach to decoration, “juxtaposing things that seem to fight each other but in the end are visually rewarding. It’s one hundred percent intuitive. I’ve been decorating for a long time. It’s a culmination of things I did for other people and for myself. It’s all word-of-mouth. Friends of family, friends of friends – they all pass me down. It’s better than being passed up!”
Lyle, of course, has run a highly respected furniture and accessories business for over 30 years. And whether you like his maximalist approach to interiors, they’re not something anyone’s likely to “pass up.” They are, in fact, hard to ignore, thanks to Lyle’s audacious point of view, which is anything but anodyne.
About 95 percent of the contents of the house were purchased specifically to “create different moods for different rooms,” he states. “I like people to get the whimsy of it. It feels smart, and I like the tension.” Yet it’s a tension that nevertheless resolves by conjuring its own immersive experience. Rooms move from beige (living room) to green (entry) to blue (dining room) to black (kitchen and den) to egg-yolk yellow (guest room), sweeping you up in a wave of irresistible ebullience. And everywhere, objects demand attention and make you want to know about their strange and wondrous origins.
While the Jenningses might have been shocked, there is, however, a thread connecting them to the present-day incarnation of their stately home – surprise. It’s what sparked their spontaneous, unlikely romance, and it lives in every nook and cranny of the house today.
Photography by Mark Roskams.
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