Pink, Purple and Blue: At Home With NancyJane and Jeff Loewy

Two ospreys circle a pond at the southern edge of NancyJane and Jeff Loewy’s home in Southampton.

“We have egrets in the trees,” she said, trying to override her neighbors’ leaf blowers.

The trees surrounding the two acres are magnificent. Pulling up to the property, you get a sense of how the area must have looked before developers from Florida built the 38 homes that make up the association.

Large blue spruce trees, Norwegian pine, birch and red maple are maintained meticulously in all their glory. Pink crepe myrtle was added later.

NancyJane used the mature specimen trees to her advantage as a striking backdrop to her whimsical landscape designs.

Color is the name of the game with NancyJane. She comes to the door dressed in head-to-toe pink, from rose-colored aviator glasses to pink kitten heels, a pink watch and gigantic crochet, floral earrings.

The rings on her fingers are old-time cameos surrounded by pink plastic, representing a design aesthetic she uses a lot inside her home, pairing something old with something bold.

On a hot summer day, her husband, Jeff, is reading the newspaper on the back porch overlooking the garden beds and pool. NancyJane brings over a platter with a pitcher of mango iced tea and pink plastic cups on tall stems.

“It’s a corner landscape,” she said, “We bought the corner property 20 years ago. It’s very circular, with so many beds zooming around the property.”

It’s hard to keep up with NancyJane as she zooms around the property.

“I buy all the flowers,” she said. “Petunias, million bells, rose trees, spirea, lythrum, hydrangeas, at Fowlers and Eastland.” Japanese grasses with fluffy tops add contrast and azaleas, rhododendron, and forsythia add early spring color.

While she is adamant about deadheading her flowers, NancyJane is not exactly getting her fingernails dirty. However, she has a strong vision regarding all areas of design, especially her beds.

“I like my garden to be pink, purple and blue. They connect with each other. If I had red or yellow, it would clash,” she said. “It’s serene. It flows together.”

A small dragonfly lands on a pink double Knockout rose.

“I like symmetry. Same in the house. I have pairs of everything,” she said. “I like to balance the color. Two pink, two purple. Balance, you see?”

Rose trees are trimmed into a neat ball accenting the pool area. When the season is over, NancyJane takes them out of their containers and transplants them into the beds, adding to the repeating patterns of shapes and colors. “I run roses all the way around the yard,” she said. “They bloom from June to December.”

Beds are planted traditionally, with higher ones in back and lower ones in front. “We trim the lower ones round,” she said. “The round shape gives the garden some style.” As the garden grows, blue and pink hydrangea merge with purple nepeta, creating an orgy of color.

As the boxwood balls grow, they form a rim around the beds. “Over here I do the same,” she said.

As we walk the green expanse of lawn, even the sculptural artwork picks up the color of the flowers.

“Here’s a frog,” she said. A neon amphibian, the size of a small horse, faces the pool as if contemplating a jump. “All the pink animals are made by an artist in Milan, Italy.”

“The hydrangeas are drying out because of heat, but the petunias love the heat,” she said, moving back toward the house.

The heat brings us indoors. We enter through the kitchen and take a seat at the banquette. The kitchen, dining and living rooms are surprisingly beige. The contrast is jarring, but NancyJane is hiding some surprises.

Jeff has gone to lunch in Southampton with a houseguest.

“My sister introduced us. She told me, ‘I think you would like Jeff.’ She told Jeff, ‘I think you’d like my sister,’” NancyJane said. “I think it’s cute.

“He took me to a Chinese restaurant, and I was very good with the chopsticks,” she said. “He thought I’d be good with him. So here we are. Chop, chop, chop. Fifty years in 2026.”

One weekend in August, the fashionable couple attended two charity galas. Friday night was Guild Hall, where Jeff has been a board member for 25 years. On Saturday, they hit the Moroccan-themed benefit for Southampton Hospital, where NancyJane serves on the auction committee. She’s also on the board of Rogers Memorial Library and the Southampton Arts Center.

“Jeff sold his investment company just before the lockdowns,” NancyJane said. “He loves being retired. We’re always busy. He lets me book all the socials, and he’s always on board.”

The couple take pride in supporting local restaurants but do not have a favorite one. “We love them all,” she said. And of course the home is filled with artwork they’ve picked up at local galleries and shows.

“At night, I really dress. I always wear bright colors. I’m always so coordinated,” she said. “My husband is a dapper dresser. We take photos of each other. It’s fun.”

The couple have two sons and three grandchildren. They raised their children in Manhattan, where she grew up.

She even designs the tree liners in front of their Park Avenue building each season and decorates the lobby for Christmas in December. “I’m lucky they let me use my talents,” she said.

Her parents met in Syracuse, where her father worked for the family’s manufacturing company, Syracuse Ornamental Company, or Syroco as it’s known in the design world.

Her mother was attending a summer program at Syracuse University at the time. “My mother was very creative. She had great style and taste.”

Creativity took center stage, while NancyJane was at boarding school in Philadelphia and later, at Garland Junior College in Boston. She made copper-enamel jewelry and pottery in a kiln and crafted needlepoint pillows. She designed crepe paper flowers for her senior prom and artwork for the yearbook.

Although she credits her mother with inspiring her creativity, it goes deeper. Her great-grandfather, woodcarver Richard Holstein came to New York from Warsaw, Poland, in the late 1800s.

He began his career making funerary adornments. When he couldn’t keep up with his many orders, he expanded his horizons and came up with a magic formula to mass produce homewares, including clocks, mirrors, wall sconces, corkscrews, ashtrays and much more, using compression-molded wood pulp.

“I thought he was a little bit of a genius because no one was doing that at the time,” she said.

Her father was the CEO when he sold the company to Dart Industries in 1965. At that time, they had made the move to plastics. The number of items manufactured were ingrained in American popular culture and remain collectibles to this day.

One 1960s advertisement urged customers to “Discover the colorful world of Lady Syroco,” in their first women’s catalog. In a way, NancyJane has grown to embody her family’s fascinating history.

Inside the home, NancyJane has decorated each bedroom with a different color scheme and theme. The grandchildren have an African theme. A Chinese-themed guest room is accented with blues.

In another guest room, she took a family heirloom, a painting of a European village, and fitted it with a purple plastic frame.

“You can do that,” she said. “By changing one thing, you can totally change everything.”

NancyJane lets loose in the basement level of the home, where neon lounges and game rooms open to the pool area. A cotton candy machine can’t be too far away.

Upstairs, the master bedroom is a serene sea of green. “Yellow green, moss green, bright green,” she said. Step outside on the stately pillared porch and pots overflow with flowers.

“I always say, ‘It’s good to be good,’” she said, looking down at the pond, a fountain blowing water into the August air. An egret flies by. It’s time to join Jeff for lunch.