Step One: Moving This 1890s Hamptons House (Pink Turret and All!) Away From a Bluff

Farrow & Ball’s Oval Room Blue colors the kitchen’s walls, ceiling, and millwork. Holophane Gasolier from Obsolete; deVol sconces; backsplash of antique tile; custom brass-and-glass shelves; cabinet hardware by Merit Metal; Lacanche range; sink fittings by Barber Wilsons & Co.

Commuting to a jobsite is rarely the highlight of a designer’s day. But for Hadley Wiggins, who is based on Long Island’s North Fork, a new project on the South Fork presented her with an opportunity. Instead of spending 90 minutes in her car, why not spend 10 minutes on her boat? More than just a way to bypass the Hamptons’ notoriously traffic-choked roads, the trip became a daily immersion in the changing light across Peconic Bay—and a revelation of what her clients had admired in the turreted Victorian cottage known as Clover House, poised on a bluff overlooking that view.

“The turret is original, and it was pink,” the AD100 designer points out. “And it is pink now, of course. Sarah has quite a connection to pink.” That client, Sarah Wetenhall, is the taste-making owner and CEO of The Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, where “Colony Pink,” a bespoke Farrow & Ball concoction, is a manifestation of the nostalgic, beachcombing vibe she extols.

The 1890s Queen Anne–style home is painted a shade of pink that recalls the signature hue of Palm Beach’s Colony Hotel, the business of homeowners Sarah and Andrew Wetenhall. The gardens were designed by SMI Landscape Architecture.

Sarah Wetenhall with her children and one of the family’s Cavalier King Charles spaniels in the game tower.

A custom sofa wearing de Le Cuona’s Ragamuffin fabric centers the den; Howe London sconces with custom shades; vintage oak coffee table sourced from The Expert; late-19th-century Turkish Konya rug from Robert Kime.

Wetenhall and her family travel seasonally between Palm Beach, New York, and the Hamptons, and as her three children grew, their 19th-century farmhouse in East Hampton village seemed to shrink around them. Determined not to be the proverbial shoemaker whose offspring go barefoot, in 2021 she found a solution that satisfied the family’s wish to be near the water and her own craving for architectural substance in one rosy package.

On the back porch, Bonacina chairs pull up to a custom Iroko wood dining table by Sarza.

The children’s bunk room features decorative painting by Meg Boscawen; quilt by Projektityyny; Gardner pillow by Pierce & Ward.

De Gournay’s hand-painted Clover House wallpaper envelops the dining room, where a set of Mama Bear chairs by Mulligan’s with cushions of a Robert Kime stripe surround a bespoke extendable dining table by McIntosh & Company. Vaughan chandelier and sconces.

The Queen Anne–style house, built in the 1890s, was originally part of a summer colony in Noyac, just outside Sag Harbor. Though small—the cottage had four tiny bedrooms—it allowed for significant expansion, and Wetenhall and her husband and business partner, Andrew, worked with seasoned East Hampton architect Amado Ortiz to nearly triple its size. Before starting, they prudently moved it back from the bluff. “Oddly enough, it was not that big a deal,” Wetenhall says. “You literally rub a few bars of Ivory soap on some I-beams, jack the house up onto the beams, and pull it really, really, really slowly with a tractor.”

A guest room is swathed in Karun Thakar’s Floral Lattice from Soane Britain; vintage wingback chair in a Rose Tarlow Melrose House fabric; vintage Chinese Chippendale canopy bed from 1stDibs; custom rug by Patterson Flynn.

The children’s bath features a Waterworks tub and fittings; vintage globe pendant from Obsolete; Howe London sconces; walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s De Nimes.

At The Colony, Wetenhall has partnered over the years with Kemble Interiors and other accomplished designers. Wiggins came with her own bona fides: Her parents, both veterans of the advertising business, restored old buildings in their off-hours, and her childhood summer home on Martha’s Vineyard was a New Hampshire barn they’d dismantled and brought to the island in numbered pieces. Though Victoriana was new to her, Wiggins says, “I can’t think of an aesthetic or a sensibility that I wouldn’t be interested in diving into if you tell me we want to be true to it.”

In the poolhouse, a custom sectional upholstered in Pierre Frey’s Le Dauphin wraps around an ottoman in Holland & Sherry’s Patagonia. Large mirror from Michael Trapp in West Cornwall, Connecticut; vintage rattan armchair, floor lamp, and side table from Beall & Bell in Greenport, New York; pair of Emery chairs by Jamb.

“Restore or replicate” became the project’s bywords. “I wanted to reuse every doorknob, every sink, every hinge,” Wetenhall says, a good deal of which they did. Where original woodwork couldn’t be salvaged, fir walls, pine floors, and oak staircases were matched down to their trim profiles and V-grooves, and a stain was custom-mixed from 13 ingredients to give the additions an age-appropriate glow. The result is enveloping, Wiggins says, “like being inside a tramp art box.” Clover House contains no wallboard—“the millwork has millwork,” she jokes—but it does contain made-to-measure details in keeping with an era when houses conformed to peoples’ lives, rather than the inverse. The angular floor plan bristles with octagonal spaces that connect in four directions. Practical, poetic, unquestionably cloverlike—and a brain-frying puzzle to build. Ortiz drafted designs that broke down the complex geometry and extended it onto the second and third floors, which hold family bedrooms and the couple’s shared office under the eaves. (Architecture firm The Brooklyn Studio contributed many intricate details, including millwork, and inlaid flooring.)

The turret is topped with a Witch’s Hat roof, a distinctive feature of Queen Anne architecture.

A glimpse of the pantry that is outfitted in cabinetry by Wirth & Company, who did the millwork throughout the house.

The main bedroom’s turret nook, with built-in dog bed below, is fitted with an octagonal cushion and pillows of Holland & Sherry’s Savile Row Windsor Tweed. The window treatments are of Soane Britain’s Papyrus Stripe.

The Victorians were magpies when it came to furnishings, and Wiggins ran with that idea, building subtle concordances of color, pattern, form, craft, and origin across a sophisticated selection of pieces—and in record time, thanks to Wetenhall’s decisiveness. “Almost everything here is antique or fabricated from scratch,” the designer says, gesturing to a paper-cord lampshade and a painterly hooked rug in the living room, the latter adapted and re­colored from vintage motifs. A sculptural canopy bed in a guest room is the work of designer Bastien Halard, who reproduced his own four-poster in the Cotswolds after Wiggins reached out with an admiring request. In the dining room, she collaborated with de Gournay on bisque-colored wallpaper drawn from vintage examples and personalized with family-specific details. Embroidered curtains, a hand-painted tray ceiling, antique Portuguese tiles surrounding the fireplace—all contribute to a deeply nuanced sense of place.

Designer Hadley Wiggins in the dining room.

Looking out from the poolhouse.

For Wetenhall, the room does more than accommodate friends and family for holidays in a way she’s wanted for decades; it resonates with the authenticity she cherishes most about her new home. “Definitely one of my favorite spots,” she says.

In the powder room, a vintage bamboo mirror and mercury glass sconce hang above a custom wood sink with Drummonds fittings.

In the spring of 2025, the Wetenhalls purchased The Hedges Inn in East Hampton, a 13-room guesthouse that is on the National Register of Historic Places. They worked with AD100 designer David Netto to restore it in time for the 2026 summer season and have introduced game nights, beach picnics, and other pastimes that conjure the kinds of charmed connections people remember making, generations later, during a hotel stay.

Wetenhall with her children and one of the family’s dogs in the kitchen lounge of their Sag Harbor home.

“The experience is always informing how you feel,” Wetenhall says. She admits that her professional obsession with such details has “bled into my personal life—I can’t avoid thinking about it in my own house, just like I do in my hotels.” As her family has come to appreciate, there’s an upside to that.

The Wetenhalls's home, designed by Hadley Wiggins, appears in the July/August issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.