This Historic Watch Hill Estate Serves As an Inspired Backdrop for a Major Art Collection
Heidi and Tom McWilliams collaborated with designer Sam Ewing to masterfully rejuvenate their grand Rhode Island manse
“I was quite pleased with myself for making the house livable by the following Fourth of July,” recalls Tom, who was residing in New York City at the time. Named Sunset Hill for its commanding water views atop one of the highest coastal bluffs in New England, the stately home has since undergone an even more thorough and fanciful rejuvenation. These updates, carried out over the past 15 years, were largely driven by another consequential element in this enduring love story: Heidi McWilliams, the art adviser whom Tom married in 2007.
Collaborating with Heidi’s friend Sam Ewing, a longtime decorator based in Orlando, Florida, the couple breathed new life into every nook and cranny of the six-bedroom home. The dark, back-of-house kitchen, for example, now in shades of honey and deeply inviting, was a white-knuckle gut renovation that required cutting a 14-by-12-foot opening into the framework-less stone for a large window that transformed the space. “I was scared to death the whole building would tumble down,” Tom recollects.
Throughout this old grande dame of a house, original cypress trim and moldings have been unearthed from beneath decades of paint and the walls have been refinished in sumptuous shades, providing a robust backdrop for the McWilliamses’ eclectic art collection. In the living room, one of Sean Scully’s signature geometric abstractions pops against a custom straw color that picks up the glow of the setting sun. The adjacent teal green dining room hosts a flaming-red canvas by Ha Chong-Hyun and a dazzling scrawl-like collage by Jean Dubuffet.
In addition to contemporary and modern works, the couple’s collection also encompasses Greek and Roman antiquities, Italian glass, African sculpture, and Japanese lacquer objects. “There’s a lot of layering in the way we live and collect,” says Heidi, a former gallerist and current board member of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, as well as The European Fine Art Foundation, which stages prestigious annual fairs in the Dutch city of Maastricht and New York.
Much of the furniture, meanwhile, already belonged to Tom. “We repurposed, reupholstered, and relocated,” Ewing quips. In the billiards room, which features walls of approximately 26-inch-thick native granite like the rest of the home, the trio injected some pizzazz with a Coraggio animal-print velvet that now clads the voluminous sofa, brought in from the living room. “It was the right vibe—dynamic, interesting, sexy looking, and kind of exciting,” Heidi says.
Winsome pale greens and yellows were used for the fabrics on existing seating in the sunroom. Here, Ewing painted the arched windows’ white mullions a deep charcoal green. “If you paint windows dark, you look through the windows, and your eyes don’t stop,” Ewing points out.
Any new furnishings that he and Heidi sought to introduce needed Tom’s approval. “Our rule was, we don’t do anything until the three of us agree, and if it doesn’t fly, it always ends up better,” Ewing explains. In the living room, gleaming brass floor lamps and a vintage python-covered cocktail table give a little twist to the classical surroundings. In Heidi’s crisp white office, formerly a maid’s room, they tossed traditional to the wind by pairing a spectacular geometric, metal-based desk designed by Lorin Marsh with a three-dimensional cardboard wall sculpture by artist Marco A. Castillo.
Outdoors, where the gardens have been ravishingly restored, two sculptures are in lovely dialogue: one of Jun Kaneko’s charismatic “Dango” pieces (the Japanese word for “dumpling”) and a monumental form by Ursula von Rydingsvard that looks like the cedar she usually works with for her nature-inspired output but is in fact bronze. It was an early foray into using the alchemic metal for the artist, after the couple convinced her that timber would not survive Watch Hill’s harsh elements.
As with most century-old mansions, the work at Sunset Hill is never done. For instance, six tons of debris were recently removed to make way for a new dressing room and bath for Heidi. And no doubt more improvements will present themselves to this ambitious, dynamic couple. “It seems like there’s always a project,” Tom muses, “but the more love you give this place, the more it gives back.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Summer Issue under the headline “Fresh Perspective.” Subscribe to the magazine.
This Historic Watch Hill Estate Serves As an Inspired Backdrop for a Major Art Collection
