The Pennoyers were my clients and became my friends. I had the incredible privilege of sharing a horse on their property and riding with them on their 25 acre preserve in the year between the time Skip Lauinger moved to Virginia and my building my own stable in Fort Salonga. Newsday: 9/7/00 Stable Conditions by Jan Tyler .....A somewhat different scenario threads through Cecily and Paul Pennoyers 50-year history of living the stable life; the Pennoyers actually made their home in their familys 1926 stable for a couple of years, even before the horses were relocated. Although Paul Pennoyer, an attorney, is a grandson of J.P. Morgan, he and his wife opted for the simple life on the Morgans 100-acre Locust Valley estate where several family homes and outbuildings plus a working farm were part of the complex. The stable was beautiful; its even more so now. Its a rural paradise, says Cecily Pennoyer. We raised five children in this place, where they learned to split wood for the fire, gather eggs, grow carrots, beets and beans and bale hay for the horses; we had the only baler left in Nassau County. At first the Pennoyers lived in the fully equipped former farmhands quarters, a wing attached to the stables huge midsection. Moving the horses into a nearby pig pen, where three are still housed, the couple gradually converted the ample spaces into habitable rooms. The horse stalls became a 35-foot-long study with mullioned windows fitted into the door openings. The equally large living area, which had stored equipment, is now a cozy living room where a fire burns almost continually in a colonial style brick-oven fireplace. The tack room became the kitchen, the feed room the dining room-and a small stall for a pair of donkeys named Concertina and Clarinet became a telephone room, the animals hoof marks sentimentally preserved on the wainscot paneling.... .....It would be hard to find a place evocative of more storybook charm: A long dirt road that winds past rail-fenced pastures where horses still graze leads to a patchwork of picturesque coops, pens and corrals close to the rambling converted stable behind a low stone wall. A clock tower (its mechanism, wound weekly, chimes on the hour) adds an architectural distinction to the former stables facade, now nearly obscured by mature laurels and climbing ivy.... The floor here is of worn brick that Cecily Pennoyer put down herself in the mid-1960s after rescuing them from her husbands abandoned family home on the estate. It was a house Grandpa Morgan gave my husbands mother, she explains.He gave a house to each of his children. That house was demolished five years ago when the land, once a favorite route for the Meadowbrook Fox Hunt, was subdivided. Part was sold to a developer, 25 acres were donated by the Pennoyers to the North Shore Wildlife Sanctuary, and 13 acres were retained for their homestead. .....Weve paid heavily to live the rustic life, says Cecily Pennoyer. Our homegrown flowers, vegetables, eggs and honey all cost more in the long run, but theyre fresh, organic and taste wonderful; the taxes inch up every year. But our roots are here; thats what really counts.....
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:35:59 +0000