After Eliza Harris and her team finished installing their holiday décor last year for the public areas of Washington, Connecticut’s Mayflower Inn & Spa, she hosted a dinner party for 30 there to celebrate the work. She invited, in spirit, the likes of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, the late society hostesses Brooke Astor and Babe Paley, novelist Edith Wharton, and even two former First Ladies, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Michelle Obama—all guests that were living or not.
“We assigned everybody who was actually invited the name of an iconic grande dame—someone from history, recent or of the past,” says Harris. The young designer is well acquainted with iconic women, being the great-granddaughter of Sister Parish, the revolutionary interior and textile designer who founded her namesake firm in 1933. Had the late Mrs. Onassis been at the dinner table, she could have told tales of the work Sister Parish did for her at the White House.
For last year’s holiday season, Eliza Harris and her team of designers from Sister Parish Design decorated the trees, stairways, lobby and all public areas of the Mayflower Inn & Spa. Much of the design scheme involved bringing a sense of the outdoors inside.
For last year’s holiday season, Eliza Harris and her team of designers from Sister Parish Design decorated the trees, stairways, lobby and all public areas of the Mayflower Inn & Spa. Much of the design scheme involved bringing a sense of the outdoors inside.
Some 500 fabric stars crafted from Sister Parish’s Serendipity pattern were fashioned as ornaments.
Garlands drape the inn’s main stairway.
A colorful wreath made of bayberry is set against a console and patterned wallpaper.
All of the holiday décor—stockings, ornaments, tree skirts, tablecloths—were made by local and regional artisans. The throw pillows use Sister Parish’s iconic Dolly pattern, here in hues of cranberry red and pine green.
A few scenes from the Garden Room, designed by Celerie Kemble, which is the main dining area at the inn.
Katie and Michael Patton, owners of Dark + Diamond, fashioned wreaths to hang from windows, while fabric stars crafted from Sister Parish’s Serendipity pattern adorn a tree.
After the design work was complete, Eliza Harris hosted a dinner at a long table set with a cloth made of Sister Parish’s La Fortuna pattern. Table styling was by Mieke ten Have.
It’s a holiday tradition at the Mayflower Inn & Spa—a venerable 30-room property set amid 58 bucolic acres—to commission a major designer to transform the lobby, dining room and bar, and other gathering spaces. This year’s décor is being created by Alexandra O’Neill, founder and creative force behind the womenswear fashion brand Markarian—named, by the way, for a series of especially colorful celestial galaxies.
When Harris and her mother, Susan Crater (granddaughter of Parish), who serves as the CEO of Sister Parish Design, were selected for the 2023 job, Harris recalls being given carte blanche in what to do. “The extraordinarily accommodating management at the Mayflower kind of just said, ‘Go ahead, go at it,’” the chief creative officer recalls. She and her team worked with several self-imposed goals: Decorations needed to be made in America, local artisans and suppliers were to be favored, and patterns fashioned by her ancestor should be incorporated. In conceiving the design, Harris stresses, “I think the holidays are a time to be playful with your décor. Nothing should be too precious. I wanted everyone who came inside the Mayflower to feel as if they were coming back inside their own home in Connecticut.”
In fulfilling her directives, Harris commissioned a local artisan to make 500 fabric star ornaments, each covered with Sister Parish’s iconic Serendipity pattern, in hues of cranberry-red and spruce-green. Each ornament was hand-stitched, then adorned with a red ribbon. “I wanted the handwork to be visible,” she says, “an indication that these were artisan-made.” Galaxies of stars were positioned on two trees—a towering one in the lobby that is topped by a pair of antique tin angels, and another more diminutive one in the inn’s Garden Room.
pattern, here in hues of cranberry red and pine green. Photography by John Gruen
Meanwhile, Harris found a manufacturer in New York’s Garment District to make stockings to affix to the inn’s fireplace mantels, with additional stockings stitched to sell to guests at the hotel. Elsewhere in Harris’s design scheme, she fostered a warm glow throughout the inn by designing lampshades from the Sister Parish Serendipity pattern.
Swags of garlands wind their way up the Inn’s main staircase, scroll across fireplace mantels, while wreaths dangle playfully in front of windows. While many of the most conspicuous items used to create the holiday atmosphere were made by hand, others were expertly fashioned by Mother Nature. Dark + Diamond, a noted floral designer, supplied much of the actual greenery. The firm’s husband–wife owners, Katie Patton and Michael Patton, spent time roaming their 10-acre property in Ancram, New York, and nearby woods and meadows for evergreen branches and pinecones, mossy branches and dried blooms of clematis, tree barks and wild mushrooms. “Whatever is growing, I’m foraging,” says Katie Patton, “not like a farmer who grows specific things, but whatever I find in fields and forests.” The wreaths, mistletoe, even the sculptural amaryllis flowers that sprout from tabletop centerpieces were found—and fashioned as décor—by the Pattons.
“It was really exciting to be able to honor the season by carefully gathering and collecting forms from our landscape,” says Patton, whose firm’s name derives from a passage in a Jack Kerouac novel. “It was a great collaboration with Sister Parish. I think our aesthetics, juxtaposed with their beautiful fabrics, managed to reflect the Mayflower and its gorgeous countryside.” Harris adds, “Much of what we accomplished with Dark + Diamond was about bringing nature indoors.”