The Chancellor’s Mansion: A Renovation Story of Family, Home, History, and Mystery

The breathtaking story of one family’s journey to restore, renovate, and preserve a historic mansion. It’s a million-dollar project with gorgeous potential--and many challenges.

THE CHANCELLOR’S MANSION was built by William Townsend McCoun, a public servant and abolitionist in New York City. The once-grand house on a hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island, had been abandoned for years. Many would have torn the property down and built something new on the land. But Jamie and Frantz Arty realized the house had more to give.

The couple purchased the home, moved in, and began period-specific renovations at the height of the pandemic, with their parents and three young children in tow.

The Artys were determined to see their dream project come to life, in spite of its challenges: a tree growing through the living room floor, a roof on the verge of collapse, and a snapping turtle stuck in a stone-lined hole on the grounds. And those were the easy fixes.

While renovating, Jamie learned that the chancellor had a Black servant by the name of Sophia Moore. Her headstone reads: Born a slave in the state of New Jersey, bought her Freedom and for 25 years was a faithful friend and servant to the family of William Townsend McCoun. She is buried alongside the chancellor and his family --unusual for the time.

The Chancellor’s Mansion is not only an incredible historical play-by-play but a story of a house, the many families who have occupied it, and what it means to create a home.

Jamie Arty is a graphics design graduate of Hofstra University. She took on the renovation of the Chancellor’s Mansion with her husband, Frantz, in January 2018 and created the Making Over a Mansion group in 2019. Jamie enjoys exploring not only the renovation of a historically significant structure, but also the rarity of Black restorers and renovators in design.