Nannette's FEAST

How do you bring back a house built by a Rockefeller? In Weston, Connecticut, designer Nannette Brown transforms a historic house into a banquet of delights.

- By INGRID ABRAMOVITCH

Diane Tate knocked on the door of a Georgian Revival in Weston, Connecticut, with trepidation. Her grandmother, Elaine “Bunny” Rockefeller McAlpin—a niece of John D.—had built the house nine decades earlier with her husband Henry Clinch Tate. The new owners weren't expecting her, but they were welcoming. “Come in,” they said. “Look around.”

A custom folding wall in bronzed steel and glass separates the dining and living rooms. Vintage table from High Style Deco; chairs by DLV Designs; custom rug by Patterson Flynn; 19th-century mantel from Marc Maison.

She returned one recent afternoon, her grandmother's diamond ring glittering on her finger, to meet the couple's interior designer, Nannette Brown. Out came envelopes of black-and-white photos of the house—including a 1935 cornerstone ceremony in which her grandmother, in a white cotton dress, gloves, and saddle shoes, sipped champagne and playfully troweled mortar onto the brick façade. Other pictures showed skating parties on the pond and her aunt, then a toddler, cavorting with a pet goat.

A painting by John Funt hangs over a Steinway grand piano in the living room. Custom sofa; George III armchair from Humphrey Carrasco; Diego Mardegan chandelier from Galerie Glustin; custom Swedish rug from Doris Leslie Blau; 1930s plaster relief by Emile Just Bachelet over the mantel.

“This is a house with so much history,” says Brown, who is based in New York City and has spent the last two years restoring and updating the property. “You can’t betray what you inherit. You have to modernize gently.”