“Britain is a country of great eccentrics,” muses interior designer Adam Greco, whose own view of ‘British whimsy’ manifests in charming chintz and heirloom curios, filtered through the lens of cultural treasures like Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins. It’s a highly romanticized spin, something the New York City–based designer, who’s worked on properties like London’s The Ned and Oslo’s Sommerro, felt wanting in the hospitality space, even across many landmark British hotels.
“As a foreigner I remember walking into a grand hotel on London’s Regent’s Street and thinking it looked like a function room in Cincinnati inside,” he says. “It was disappointing.”
Recently, though, a wave of UK properties have started to embrace the kinds of cultural eccentricities that Greco saw as lacking in those hotels. This updated approach to the whimsical British aesthetic, all vintage bric-a-brac set alongside some serious art collections and sumptuous fabrics, is best expressed in the UK at properties like the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe, about 20 miles south of Bath, and the Fort Road Hotel in Margate along the southeast coast.
Lately, the design aesthetic has captured America’s attention, and found a home in upstate New York: Soho Farmhouse is due to open its outpost in Rhinebeck, New York, next year. The team behind the Cotswolds’ Estelle Manor is said to be searching for a property in a similar patch close to the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. These new builds are a bid to lure affluent New Yorkers who have outgrown the Hamptons, and, as former magazine editor turned hotelier Dorian Greenspan puts it, “provide something wilder, that feels genuinely rural rather than relocated.”
Greenspan’s own property, Maison Monna, is only 40 minutes from the city in Old Chatham, a charming hamlet he discovered when vacationing in the area with his partner.
With Monna, he wanted to speak to this
With Monna, he wanted to speak to this new breed of luxury traveler, someone who wants to feel “comfortable, cared-for, but not smothered,”—a natural companion to British whimsy’s lived-in, been-here-for-decades sensibility. Maison Monna was a perfect canvas for the expression of this trend, largely because it had sat untouched on the market for so many years. The style of the three-bedroom house is Greek Revival, though records show its bones date back to the Quakers (it makes sense, then, that scenes for Mona Fastvold’s award-winning The Testament of Ann Lee were shot close by).
To populate it, Greenspan looked to his personal archive of antiques, yet by the time it all arrived, he explains, the effect was “a bit too monastic.” The fix? “To add a little British whimsy.” That translated into custom upholstery; fabricsloth Shop; DeVol sconces; and cheery ruffled skirting in the kitchen
It also meant being open to quirks and imperfections—Greenspan wanted the creak in the floorboards. He was even okay with gaps, “so long as no one falls through.”
With Maison Monna, the style softens the property’s Shaker roots (it was built in 1796), but at the Six Bells in Hudson Valley’s Rosendale, British whimsy is interwoven with pure American nostalgia. Greco, who designed the three-story 1850s property for entrepreneur Audrey Gelman, explains the distinction is key: “It’s Audrey’s love of late 20th century catalogue Americana, the Vermont Country Store and Lillian Vernon,” with its bold ginghams, Laura Ashley florals, and ruffled baskets, trussed up in a design vernacular that feels unmistakably English.
When guests step onto the property, Greco’s aim
When guests step onto the property, Greco’s aim was to create a sense of “déjà vu, or something uncanny—like, have I been here before? Did I imagine this? Is this where my grandmother had her first kiss?” Of the property’s 11 rooms, it is the Innkeeper’s Suite that is his favorite, with a built-in, hand-painted box bed, a hallmark of so many English country homes. Forty minutes further into the Catskills in Hensonville, 2025 Hot List winner The Henson is a marked example of a softer interpretation.
At this 16-room inn, living spaces are flooded with natural light, and touches of bouclé and natural woods create a serene, homey feel. The family portraits that hang in the hotel’s ‘living room’ aren’t purely decorative, either—they are hand-me-downs from co-owner Ely Franko’s grandparents, who once hung them in their home in Turkey (Ely and his wife Danielle co-own the property alongside chefs Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske Valtierra).
Ditsy floral quilt toppers add a sentimental anchor to bedrooms, while vintage pieces threaded throughout the rest of the property have been lovinglysame unfussy, lived-in register that both Greenspan and Greco have also created in their respective projects, but here it is without direct reference to Britain at all
And perhaps that is the point. It’s not that a handful of hoteliers and designers are taking a cut-and-paste approach to decorating these properties but rather that they’re paying homage to the instincts behind it: a resistance to newness, artful curation of clutter, and a veneration of the past through beautiful antiques. It is a design language that’s developed enough that American hotels now speak fluently.
Source: www.cntraveler.com
