British Home & Gardens

The Simple Life 
Words by Hilary Robertson
Photographs by Graham Atkins-Hughes

Living and working in a large city has much to recommend it, but as any city dweller will tell you, things tend to be done at a fast pace and after a while, it can all become rather exhausting. So it was for Allison Storr, a lifestyle adviser and New York resident for seven years. “I do love Manhattan, but my job is very demanding and I realised that I needed a break from the energy of the city. I wanted to recuperate by living by the sea,” Allison says. She found a characterful weatherboarded cottage in Sag Harbor, which is two hours’ drive away on Long Island. And having rented out her apartment, she left the city. 

Sag Harbor has come a long way from its origins as a whaling town. These days, it is a chic seaside escape for wealthy New Yorkers seeking relief from the city’s heat and humidity during the summer months. Houses have been snapped up as second homes, and the owners’ desire to live in comfort has seen Sag Harbor’s streets fill with art galleries and antiques and contemporary homeware shops - rich hunting grounds for the numerous interior designers who are called upon to decorate these homes. 

Allison’s cottage - what Americans refer to as a “fixer-upper” - has three bedrooms and a third of an acre of garden behind a picket fence overlooking a nature reserve. She was certainly excited at the prospect of getting to work on it, but wanted someone alongside, off whom she could bounce her ideas. “I’m confident that I know what I like, but it still helps to work with someone else,” she says. Which is where Sydney Maag comes in. 

Allison had met the interior designer through her work and she felt that Sydney, who had lived in Sag Harbor for several years before moving to New York, would be the perfect collaborator. “There were things I needed to do and things that I didn’t,” says Allison. “Sydney knew what to prioritize and she also understood how I could economize, simply by improving the existing fixtures and fittings.”

Looking specifically at the interior, Sydney concluded that there were a number of superficial elements that could be changed easily. “There were lots of ugly paint colors and bad finishes,” recalls Allison, “and the doors and their metal furniture were awful.” Paint in a dark sage shade has totally transformed the woodwork in the kitchen and deflected attention away from the granite work surface, which was not to Allison’s taste. Meanwhile, wallpaper with a leaf and branch pattern has given the hall-dining room the intimate atmosphere it needed. 

Having settled on a pale pink for the walls of the living room and the ground floor bedroom, Allison used texture to add depth - in the bedroom, for instance, rough hessian curtains, chunky natural flooring, a sandblasted wood chest of drawers and zebra skin-covered armchair offset the prettiness of the color scheme.