Your guide to the heart of Litchfield County:
Discover local stories, hidden gems, and must-know events.

An Interior Designer’s Washington Home Blends Modern with Traditional

By Zachary Schwartz
Photos by Antoine Bootz

Who does an interior designer call when it’s time to decorate her own home? For Susan Bednar Long, the choice was easy—do it herself.

Susan Bednar Long is an interior designer residing between Connecticut and Texas. Trained at a design firm in Los Angeles, she later moved to New York City where she cut her teeth designing retail stores for Ralph Lauren. She went on to establish her own full-service design firm, S.B. Long Interiors, a business that designs high-end residential projects in the United States and Europe.

“I call my style modern traditional. Most of my projects are a mix of that. I love traditional, but I like to do it in a clean and tailored way,” explains Bednar Long. “If I’m doing an architecturally modern house, then I like to infuse it with warmer furnishings. Vice versa, if it’s a very traditional house, then it’s fun to have more modern furnishings.”

20 years ago, while living in New York City, the interior designer began looking for a weekend home outside of the city. “We called up a realtor, since we didn’t know anybody here in Litchfield, went looking for one day, and loved the area. We ended up buying this house in Washington the same weekend we looked,” says Bednar Long. Her family has since moved to Dallas, but kept their Washington home where they now spend summers and holidays.

Their three-bedroom Washington farmhouse was built in the early 1800s on a dairy cattle farm. The home has undergone several renovations, including a kitchen makeover and new primary bathroom with the help of Sean Woodward of Woodco LLC. The agricultural history of the home remains in the barn that the family uses for storage and the occasional haunted Halloween party.

In decorating the country home’s interiors, Bednar Long mingles antique furniture with one-of-a-kind decorative objects, employing her modern traditional aesthetic. “My original inspiration was Bill Blass’ house in New Preston. I just loved the contrast of light and dark, and the classic antiques mixed with white walls and pretty plaids,” says the interior designer. “At the time I did the house, I was very much into neutrals, brown, and white. Over time, I have gotten more into color, but this house still reflects that Bill Blass vibe.”

The designer sourced much of the neutral-colored décor locally in Litchfield County. The entryway console and living room chairs come from RT Facts in Kent, while the brown antique deco screen in the living room was acquired in Bantam. Personal touches include artwork from Venice where Bednar Long married her husband, a blue and white chinoiserie vase gifted from a relative in Hong Kong, and nautical antiques nodding to the family’s ship building history.

One of the homeowner’s favorite aspects of the home is its multifaceted garden. “The outside gardens were mature when we bought the home. The former owner was really into gardening, so he did a lot to develop the garden. I’ve added to it over the years, and I love it,” says Bednar Long. Walking around the property, one will encounter apple and pear tree orchards, flower beds of daffodils and peonies, and woodland gardens with Japanese maple trees. A deceased maple tree struck during a storm adds drama to the garden, so the homeowner lights it up at night during summer patio dinner parties.

Susan Bednar Long’s country home is a study in her interior design. The benefit of this particular project is that the designer is fortunate enough to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

A Country Christmas Fantasy by Sister Parish at the Mayflower Inn

By: Zachary Schwartz

Litchfield County is an idyllic setting for the holidays, from the Christmas tree fir farms to the bedecked historic homes to the ski slopes and horse-drawn sleigh rides. This year, the holidays will twinkle even brighter and bolder thanks to the design partnership between Sister Parish Design and Mayflower Inn & Spa, Auberge Resorts Collection.

Sister Parish Design, an eponymous fourth-generation female-owned family business founded in 1933, is known for American archival-inspired interior designs and textiles. Famously, the company’s founder decorated President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Today, the legacy of Sister Parish lives on through her granddaughter, CEO Susan Crater, and great-granddaughter, Chief Creative Officer Eliza Harris. The mother-daughter duo run a Sister Parish shop in Litchfield and an online business.

“We are focused on manufacturing historically driven designs, meaning everything is derived from some sort of archival textile. All of our textiles have a story and a soul, and we keep manufacturing local in the United States,” explains Harris. “I’m constantly tweaking and recoloring the patterns. They are very bold and bright. People come to us for exactly that.”

Harris, a Salisbury resident, regularly visits the Mayflower Inn in Washington for overnight getaways and spa treatments. “As a local, I spend a lot of time there, so it was a very authentic and organic collaboration to participate in the Christmas decorations.”

From late November through early January, Sister Parish will deck the halls of the Mayflower Inn with boughs of evergreen and festive holiday adornments. Visitors can expect decorative pillows, ornaments, lampshades, and stockings in Sister Parish textiles, some of which will be for sale at the hotel boutique for those who want to make the holiday festivities last longer than a halcyon sojourn.

“I was thrilled to be able to decorate the hotel. The point is to make people feel like they are home for the holidays. I want guests to feel comfortable and to connect with their relatives and friends at the hotel. It’s all about creating those special moments,” says Harris.

In addition to an 18-foot Christmas tree festooned with upholstered ornaments and velvet ribbons, Sister Parish will showcase a custom whimsical cranberry red and green star-pattern[make this en dash, not a hyphen] textile titled Serendipity. Harris also enlisted the help of Ancram-based florist Dark and Diamond for locally foraged greenery and garlands.

“Better understanding how to bring the outdoors in is what inspired me. I wanted to make sure that the wildness of the Connecticut woods is tapped into on the mantels and centerpieces. My inspiration for the decorations also comes from my family. We’ve celebrated lots of country Christmases,” says Harris.

The aesthetic will be ornate, colorful, and nostalgic, but neither persnickety nor precious. “That is what Sister Parish does well. We have these timeless patterns that are meant to complement other patterns they might be mixed with, and certainly complement the eclectic design that decorator Celerie Kemble mastered at the Mayflower Inn.” Guests of the hotel are in for a true country Christmas fantasy.

Sabin Viehland Bring 1970 Tom Babbitt House Swingingly into the Present
By ML Ball
Photos by Rebecca Pollak Jones

“We just want somewhere really cool and colorful for our artist friends to stay.”

That was the directive given by a Washington couple to Michelle Sabin and Audra Viehland, founders of Sabin Viehland, a full-service interior design studio based in Litchfield County. The couple wanted their mid-century Tom Babbitt-designed guest house renovated and updated, but with the original layout and sensibility retained. As they embarked on this nine-month project with Sabin and Viehland in the spring of 2020, they probably assumed they would get something pretty great. What they got is off-the-charts genius.

“We tried to keep as much of Babbitt’s original details and architecture as we could,” says Viehland. “There’s hardly a right angle throughout the house and yet it’s very angular. It’s modern and quirky, with a lot of wood and windows and stone.”

Babbitt, who died in 2011 at the age of 84, was well-known in the Litchfield area, considering himself a “family architect” to whom “people in the community could bring their problems,” according to The Register Citizen. “Architecture is an art, but it’s never an art you do yourself,” he is quoted as saying in a 1979 article in The Torrington Register, reflecting his admiration for the expertise and involvement of other craftsmen in the building process.

Built in 1970, the 2,939-square-foot, four-bedroom home was designed to seamlessly blend in with the woods and rolling hills surrounding it. The fireplace is made from fieldstone harvested onsite, and the open, airy living room is bordered by a striking wall of windows with jaw-dropping views of the hills beyond.

During the renovation, when Sabin and Viehland couldn’t find original period pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s, they sourced contemporary ones which echo the house’s mid-century style, like the Turkish goat hair flat-weave rug in the living room (new), and the Milton Glaser poster (old) and Louis Poulsen ceiling lamp (new) in the dining room.  

“We like to say that we’re full-service interior design, which means that we can do renovations and work with a builder and present construction drawings and manage construction,” says Viehland. “But then we also do the other side, where we have a resale certificate and we purchase for the client and sell them furnishings.”

Sabin echoes this assessment: “We offer this layer of personally-curated objects and furnishings—the pillows on the sofas, the plates, napkins and silverware on the dining table, the linens on the beds, the decorative pieces on the shelves. [There’s even shampoo and soap in the bathrooms.] We design the whole house, then we set it up, and they can pick and choose which items they want to keep. By the end of the project, we’ve really gotten to know the client and have a good idea of how they would like to express their ideas, so they typically end up keeping 99 percent of the accessories we choose for them.”

Says Viehland, “I think if someone else had worked on this house, they would have gutted most of the rooms, ripped out the lights and cabinetry, and lost all of the originality and character that Babbitt put into it. We don’t try to do that. We’ve created a whole composition of the best way for the house to look and to work, as it used to be when it was first built but carried into today.”

Which is precisely why Sabin and Viehland are so good at what they do. —sabinviehland.com