WELCOME TO COLONY HOUSE

My New Home

There is a quiet kind of relief that comes when nothing has to be forced anymore.

Not the kind of relief that arrives all at once, like a door thrown open.

Something slower.

Something that unfolds as you move through a room and realize—without quite knowing when it happened—that the tension you were carrying is no longer there.

For years, my home held more than furniture.

It held time.

It held weight.

It was a house built out of hope—shared with my son Sam and his wife, a place where we believed life would expand forward into something full and lasting. And for a while, it did. The rooms carried laughter, work, conversation, the quiet rhythm of daily life. His footsteps overhead. His voice moving through the house as if it would always be there.

And then, as I wrote last week, everything changed.

What had once held possibility began to hold memory.

Every chair, every photograph, every small object carried something of that life, and not all of it sat lightly. Some pressed. Some lingered. Some stayed long after the moment itself had passed. The rooms did their best to contain it, but over time, the space began to feel less like a home and more like a vessel—one that had absorbed too much without ever being given a way to release it.

Grief does not stay where it belongs.

It moves.

It settles into corners.

It attaches itself to ordinary things—a doorway, a table, the light at a certain hour—and over time, those things begin to hold more than they were ever meant to carry.

And when a space cannot release, neither can the person living inside it.

Moving is often described as a logistical challenge.

Boxes. Trucks. Lists.

But this move was something else entirely.

It was not about relocation.

It was about release.

Because what I began to understand—slowly, and then all at once—is that I was not just moving things from one house to another.

I was carrying years of life that had never been set down properly.

Grief.

Love.

Memory.

The quiet accumulation of moments that had nowhere to go except into the walls around me.

And then I walked into this new space.

And something shifted.

This home does something I did not realize I needed.

It allows things to belong.

Not only in a decorative sense, or in curated way we often think about a home.

But in a deeper way.

The architecture does not compete with what you bring into it. It receives it. Light moves through the rooms without resistance. There are no corners that trap energy, no walls that feel like they are holding something back. The space feels less like something to be managed and more like something that participates.

And as I began to place my life into it, something unexpected happened.

I didn’t have to negotiate with the space.

I didn’t have to adjust, compress, or compromise.

Everything fit.

And with that, something inside me began to loosen.

The furniture that once felt heavy—burdened with everything it had witnessed—now feels grounded, almost at rest.

The artwork no longer presses for attention. It breathes.

Photographs that once carried a sharp edge of longing now sit differently. Not diminished, not forgotten—but settled. As if they’ve been given permission to exist without asking anything more of me.

Even the smallest objects—the ones that follow us through life without explanation—have found their place. Not as clutter, not as remnants, but as quiet acknowledgments of all the lives we’ve lived within one lifetime.

And then came something I did not expect.

A kind of emotional exhale.

Not dramatic. Not overwhelming.

But steady.

Sustainable.

As if something I had been holding for years—without even realizing how tightly—had finally been set down.

It made me realize something I hadn’t understood before.

Sometimes it’s not the things that are too much.

Sometimes it’s that they’ve been living in a space that cannot metabolize them.

A space that holds, but does not transform.

That house held everything.

It held the last ordinary moments before life changed.

It held the silence that followed.

It held a version of me that was still trying to understand how to live inside both.

This home transforms.

It doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t ask me to leave anything behind.

But it changes the weight of it.

The past is no longer pressing forward, asking to be resolved or understood.

It is settling.

Quietly.

Naturally.

Exactly where it belongs.

And in that settling, something opens.

There is space again—not just in the rooms, but in me.

Space for breath.

Space for stillness.

Space for a kind of joy that doesn’t have to fight its way through memory to be felt.

For the first time in a long time, I am not living inside what has happened.

I am living alongside it.

And for the first time in years, I am not trying to make things fit.

They simply do.

Why Colony House?

Olivia de Havilland Publicity Photo for Gone with the Wind - 1939

People have asked me why I call this home Colony House.

The simple answer is that it sits on Colony Avenue.

But that’s not really the reason.

The name came from somewhere else—somewhere older.

When I hear Colony, I don’t think of a street sign. I think of the Colony Hotel.

I was twenty-two when my parents sent me to Palm Beach to open a bath shop on Worth Avenue. It was 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected, and Palm Beach felt like the center of a certain kind of American optimism—polished, confident, and very glamorous.

I, of course, had voted for Jimmy Carter—a good New York liberal doing what he thought was right.

While our store fit-out was being built, I had time. And in Palm Beach, time has a way of drifting toward beautiful places. One of those places was the Colony Hotel.

It became a kind of unofficial headquarters for me.

I would sit there, watch people come and go, and feel—without quite understanding it—that I had stepped into a different version of life. There was an ease to it. A sense that things were happening, that stories were unfolding just beyond the edge of conversation.

Movie stars came through those doors.

One day, I met Olivia de Havilland.

I didn’t even realize who she was at the time. It took my mother to inform me that I had just met someone extraordinary. That was Palm Beach. You could brush up against history without even knowing it.

It was a good life for a twenty-two-year-old.

Light.

Open.

Full of possibility.

And maybe that’s what stayed with me more than anything else.

Not the place itself, but the feeling of it.

That sense of ease.

That quiet confidence that life could be enjoyed, not just endured.

So when I stepped into this new home on Colony Avenue, something in me recognized it.

Not consciously. Not at first.

But as I began to live here, to move through the rooms, to let the space settle around me, the name surfaced on its own.

Colony House.

Not because of the address.

Because of the memory.

Because of the life I lived once—and the realization that, in some quiet and unexpected way, I am living it again.

Not as a young man just starting out.

But as someone who has lived enough to understand what that feeling actually was.

And what it means to find it again.

Welcome to Colony House!

THE COLONY HOTEL - PALM BEACH