In This Artist’s 1700s Farmhouse Surrounded By Old-Growth Forest, the Chandeliers Are Made of Disposable Lasagna Trays

Near Bedford, New York, a protected reserve harbors a rare stand of old-growth forest—one of the last such stretches in the northeast. Across the street is artist Happy Menocal’s 18th-century farmhouse. A short walk through the woods are waterfalls, cathedrals of hundred-foot-tall eastern hemlocks, and an 1870s mineral quarry where, amid the rainbow leaf litter, silver streaks of feldspar and mica glitter like a disco ball. “My childhood was being in these woods,” Menocal says, and when she stumbled upon the listing late one night in June of 2020, she set up a viewing the next day.The family stopped using the front door years ago. “It‘s so old and creaky, and I don’t want to put too much wear and tear,” says Menocal. The oldest parts of the four-bedroom American Colonial–style farmhouse date to circa 1710, but what faces the road came later: a Greek Revival pilastered doorway, sidelights, and small frieze windows below the eaves. She, her husband, John, and their children, Rip and Daisy, now 9 and 11, arrived that August, happy for their slice of fairy-tale-worthy woodland, and fine with the compromise of wearing their coats in the drafty kitchen from October to April. The house was also the headquarters of Menocal’s eponymous art and design studio. Collaborating with brands like Paperless Post and Schumacher, the studio is known for witty, exuberant wedding invitations and stationery that nod to aristocratic traditions and medieval motifs.The red room makes Menocal feel like a captain. The sofa and chairs are upholstered in Gloriette, a fabric she designed for Schumacher—“a wink at Diana Vreeland’s Garden in Hell,” according to her friend Rebecca Gardner. Over the fireplace: a silk scarf hand-painted by Menocal’s friend and former assistant, the artist Elizabeth Jaeger. One of Happy Menocal Studio’s specialties is custom coats of arms that guide the design work that follows. She calls her Heraldic wallpaper for Schumacher “the hit on the album.” It’s pictured here, in her powder room, in sprezzatura—a colorway that takes its name from a Renaissance-era word for making something difficult look effortless. Jane BeilesMenocal’s friend Rebecca Gardner describes the living spaces as “very, very personal, stylish, and snappy.” In the living room, the rug is vintage from Chairish, and the leather sofa is topped with pillows in a fabric by Schumacher. Vintage Hand-Carved Swan DecoyTory Burch Lettuce Ware Candlestick (Set of 2)In a previous life, Menocal worked in the Mad Men world of big advertising, but she pivoted to art and design and met her now husband after he commissioned a painting she’d done of his mom’s basset hound; she decided to deliver it by hand, and the rest is history. For five years, the family lived in the 4,000-square-foot home dreaming up changes. Then they assembled a team with Mosolino Development contractors and Cameron & Corrigan Architects to help them modernize without sacrificing soul. Architect Kirtley Cameron recalls her first impression of the “quintessential New England” house, the oldest parts of which date to circa 1710: a conglomeration of three centuries of architecture Frankenstein’ed together into a “wonderful, rambling, homestead.” The first walk-through was “both exciting and a little daunting,” Cameron says. She found the place “beautiful, charming, and unique—and also cold, inefficient, and structurally compromised in some places.” But she reveled in working with its “old house quirks”: exposed beams, random stairs, erratic ceiling heights. While Cameron perfected the flow, Menocal picked just about every tile finish, paint color, and fabric. If she couldn’t find what she was after, she was likely to make it herself.The kitchen replaced an uninsulated 1960s space where, in previous winters, the family donned their parkas for warmth from October to April. Taped beneath the island, unframed, are two paintings Daisy and Rip made as toddlers. Simplex Buckingham No 1 Kettle by Newey & BloomerEast Fork Solid Wood Bowl“A lot of the things are just things that we dragged from the beach, or when we visited a friend, or from the yard, or I made out of bits and bobs,” says Menocal. Menocal’s mother, Katharine Barnwell, a classically trained decorative painter, lives with the family too. She chipped in creatively, including lending a hand on the dining room chandeliers, which Menocal designed and crafted from disposable aluminum lasagna trays. They cut the trays into leaves, flattened, bunched, and draped over utilitarian hanging lamps “like a hula skirt,” Menocal says.The dining room was once a greenhouse, added on in the 1960s. Sunlight streams in, bringing with it the forest’s chlorophyllous glow. In a nod to the room’s past life, Menocal hand-painted white ferns over mellow, lichen-green walls. Climbing from the floor and reaching across the ceiling, they bring her dinner guests, she says, down to “insect scale.” The butler’s pantry at the far end of the dining room might be Menocal’s favorite room. It seems to be glowing too, its walls a “cheerful but mischievous” Farrow & Ball Arsenic green—“a transition in energy” between the ethereal, botanical dining room and the bright, clean kitchen.Menocal wanted the children’s rooms to feel like their own private domains. “I don't really care if they pencil their doodles on their IKEA dresser,” she says. Jane BeilesVintage Japanese Porcelain Figure LampPendleton Eco-Wise BlanketCameron combined two connecting bedrooms into the primary suite. “The magic of the space was in section and elevation—leaning into the old house quirks with steps down, wildly different ceiling heights, exposed beams,” she says. Tiles by Zia Tile in Dorado warm up the primary bathroom. Jane BeilesMenocal’s dear friend and frequent collaborator Rebecca Gardner, the event planner and interior designer behind Houses & Parties, adores Menocal’s lightning-bug-like contagious creative inspiration and her innate, confident style. “Happy really understands a sense of place and abhors anything common…especially perfection,” Gardner says. “And she makes no compromises for comfort…. It’s feast or famine in the cushy sofa department,” she adds. Her bold tact is visible room to room, where personality shines without maximalism or overwhelming, and fun moments get space to breathe.Menocal’s mother, the classically trained decorative painter Katharine Barnwell, who lives with the family, hand-painted local landscapes onto the bedside tables, pictured here flanking a Thos. Moser pencil-post bed in cherry. Menocal cherishes the bath mat, presumably stolen at some point from New York’s Plaza Hotel and left behind by the previous owners. Flanking the mirror are antique Chinese prints that belonged to her grandparents. The Plaza Hand TowelL.L.Bean North Star Patchwork QuiltThe paper-mâché garland above Rip’s bed is by the Los Angeles artist Joel Stearns. It caught Menocal’s eye at Object Lesson, the Pasadena shop run by her friend Eli Kagan. There is art aplenty. “I really view the house like a gallery of things that people I love have made,” she says. Now on view: pottery by friends Lyn and Will Reardon of New York Stoneware (with whom she has a lamp collection), paintings by friends Cameron Goodyear and Elizabeth Jaeger.But Happy Menocal Studio features here, too. Covering two chairs in the library: her textile Gloriette for Schumacher, in the colorway red. The family calls the space “the red room.” “I've always wanted to have a red room,” she says. “I feel like that’s like the sign that you’ve arrived.”Under the stairs was a makeshift half-closet fit for not much more than concealing the family’s Wi-Fi router and an electrical panel that gave the architects the heebie-jeebies. The suggestion to convert it into a reading nook surrounded by built-in shelving was the couple’s daughter’s. “We all loved it and immediately wished we had thought of it,” says architect Kirtley Cameron. The Dutch wax cushions are, secretly, dog beds from Houses & Parties. Menocal is named after her grandmother, Harriet. This portrait of Harriet by Julian Lamar hangs in the stairwell lit by a deVOL creamware pendant. The family comes in through this side entrance now, having retired the creaky original front door. Jane BeilesThe house is surrounded by the Mianus River Gorge Preserve, which contains one of the last old-growth forests in the northeast, and a late-1800s mineral quarry, a short walk from the house. Jane Beiles