Photography by Dori Fitzpatrick
Sitting at Darien Rozell’s kitchen table, drinking hot tea from an English tea set while snow falls outside and the smell of freshly baked apple cake fills the house, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect afternoon. It feels like you’re in a postcard. You don’t want to leave.
“That’s the point of Pantry Hill,” says Darien. “I want you to feel like you can stay all day.”
Pantry Hill is the name of Darien’s house in Greenfield, where she lives with her husband, Eric, and three boys—Beau, 8; Hap, 6; and Finn, 3. It’s also the name of her lifestyle brand, an ever-evolving tribute to the Rozells’ way of life. Because while Darien is indeed the creative force that transformed a 2016 spec house located 10 minutes from downtown Saratoga into a country-style home rich with character and family history, her interior decorating skills are but a small piece of the Pantry Hill puzzle. Darien isn’t just designing her dream house—she’s designing her dream life.
While big things are on the horizon for Pantry Hill in 2025 (more on that in a minute), it all started in 2016, when Darien and Eric moved from Boston back to the Saratoga area to be closer to family. “My family and Eric’s family have both been in this area for 250 years,” Darien says. “We wanted to give that rich history to our boys—that sense of place and belonging. This is where we come from.” Darien points to a specific instance that illustrates what she’s talking about: When she was building her garden, a major focal point of life at Pantry Hill, she was having trouble with her beans, so she called her grandmother, who was able to give her gardening advice that she’d learned from her grandmother. “Her grandmother lived here,” Darien says, “so she was dealing with all the same things that I’m dealing with in the garden.”
While Darien dreamed of finding a historic home to raise her family in, it was ultimately a newer house on a hill—located a mile from where her grandfather grew up—that checked all of her and Eric’s boxes, right down to the countertops, built-in bookcases, and thick molding. But Darien still craved the warmth and character of an older home. “We lived in it for three years before we did anything,” she says of the home. “I didn’t even hang a piece of wallpaper because I was like, ‘What is this place?’ We wanted the property to talk to us.”
During that time, the Rozells did start building a garden, which ultimately ended up informing some of their interior design choices: They turned what was previously a mud room into a prep kitchen where they could wash vegetables brought in from the garden, and added a window that looks out at the garden gate. The rest of the house has been somewhat of a group effort that Darien calls a “forever project.” In the main kitchen, Eric’s dad built the range hood, Eric tiled the wall, and Darien painted all of the cabinets, the doors of which were created by a neighbor.
Also during that time, Pantry Hill, the Instagram account, was born. Heeding advice to “stay in the game” from a mentor at her former digital media job and at the encouragement of a neighbor who was inspired by the life the Rozells were building, Darien created @pantryhill to share her family’s ongoing story. Serendipitously, that was in March of 2020, when the whole world was staying home and focusing on their gardens. She told herself that if she could grow her Instagram following to 10,000 by November of that year, she’d continue to focus on it. Five years later, @pantryhill has nearly 100,000 followers.
Throughout her rise to what some would call influencer status, Darien has been very conscious of the dichotomy between her message—which focuses on themes of family, community, tradition, intentional living, and connection to nature—and the platform on which she shares it. There’s something to be said about the very real connections that can be formed on social media, but posting heirloom family recipes to tens of thousands of strangers on an app didn’t seem to Darien like the best way to honor her family’s legacy. Instead, she started sharing them via a more intimate online newsletter, where she also promotes her in-person pie workshops.
Yes, pie workshops. “My goal was for a subset of people who connect with the story to be able to come and experience it tangibly and learn something from me that is generational,” says Darien. “It’s my great-grandmother’s pie crust recipe. She raised her family on Hutchins Street in Saratoga. Just to be able to share that with somebody and then to have them take that home and share that with their families is so cool to me. That was a way to make the story a little bit more real.”
At first, Darien expected the workshops to bring in mainly local people—friends of friends. But thanks to her large online following, she now has guests who travel in from out of state (Texas, even) to take her classes. And while she loves being able to invite her followers to experience Pantry Hill in person, prepping the whole house for a nine-person pie workshop turned out to be a ton of work.
“It takes five days to get this place looking like what you expect to see from my Instagram account,” she says. “You’re seeing bits and pieces of it on my Instagram, but you’re not getting out of your car and turning 360 degrees. I have three boys. They live here. I tell people when they come here, ‘Do not open any cabinet door because I literally shoved things in there.’” The fact that she has to hide her family’s stuff to give her guests the “Pantry Hill experience” they expect also began to weigh on Darien. “It seems a little hypocritical because I’m posting about building this place for our family, and then you come in and I’ve shoved things into closets so it looks like we don’t live here,” she continues. So, in an effort to preserve her brand’s identity, her family’s sanity, and her own authenticity, Darien’s building a barn.
OK, she herself is not building the barn, though given her wide-ranging skillset, that wouldn’t be all that surprising. Instead, Darien and Eric commissioned an all-local team to build a custom 2,000-square-foot, three-story timber frame barn to house Darien’s studio (yes, there’ll be a kitchen in there for her pie-baking workshops), Eric’s office (he’s a software engineer), Eric’s dad’s workshop (he’s a retired contractor who’s been commissioned by his son and daughter-in-law to work on projects around the house), and Eric’s brother’s lavender distilling operation (he and his wife own a lavender farm in Wilton). The Rozells’ neighbor, Jeremy, is the project engineer; Eric’s childhood friend is a partner in Northern Builders, the contracting company; and Tall Pine Timber Frames, a company the couple heard about through friends, is providing the lumber, which just so happens to have been sourced from the forest located behind Eric’s childhood home. In January, when the framing for the barn went up, Darien and Eric invited their family and friends over for an old-fashioned barn-raising party, complete with pulled pork, mac and cheese, and hot apple pie.
When complete, the barn will not only ease the burden of maintaining a spotless house with three young boys, but it will also give Darien more space for future creative endeavors—two of which are already in the works.
First up: Afternoon Tea, a YouTube show produced by Bright Sighted Media that was inspired by Darien’s daily ritual of sitting down with a cup of tea to catch up with friends and family. It’s a tradition she grew up practicing with her mom and grandma, and that she has since passed on to her boys.
“We want the show to feel the same as casually catching up with a friend over tea,” Darien says. “It’s going to pull the curtain back a bit on Pantry Hill, and provide a more candid look at how we’re tapping into the knowledge and skills of our ancestors, family, friends, and community as we continue to create home.” On the show, Darien plans to cover seasonal celebrations, family traditions, cooking, gardening, and decorating, as well as deeper conversations about the hows and whys of what they’re building. Oh, and the general chaos of life with young kids. “Instagram is my business, so there is a veil over that,” Darien continues. “What I’m hoping to do with this show is to give a little bit more insight into the relatability of it all. No, I don’t wear a dress in my garden. I’m literally out there in my sweatpants. It doesn’t look pretty, but that’s how we’re getting all of those things done.” Afternoon Tea is scheduled to launch in May.
Also coming this spring is a literal afternoon tea—one Darien is producing in partnership with Saratoga Tea & Honey (though, yes, you can certainly drink it in the morning). Darien describes the Pantry Hill Blend as “a cozy cup of home with notes of maple, ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom, best served with maple syrup and milk.”
With the launch of the tea, Darien is heralding in a new era of Pantry Hill, albeit very slowly and thoughtfully. In the last five years, she’s largely refrained from monetizing her Instagram account, despite being approached by several brands. (She did agree to partner with Pottery Barn, the brand her wedding registry was through.) “I didn’t want to tire out my followers by selling other people’s things,” she says. “I needed to build this longevity and respect for the brand first.” And now that she’s built that trust, she’s ready to start selling her own products. The tea is first, but more Pantry Hill–branded products may soon follow.
For those looking to create their own version of what the Rozells have built at Pantry Hill, Darien has some advice. Firstly: “You don’t have to be in the exact right place at the exact right time. It doesn’t have to be your forever house. What do you want out of where you’re currently living? Pull that into your every day.” And secondly: “You don’t have to have a legacy of 250 years—that legacy can start with you. You can start building that feeling for your children and starting those traditions. Yes, we follow a lot of the traditions and practices that my family has for generations, but we’ve also started some of our own.”
And while the point of Pantry Hill is to share how her family is living intentionally by honoring the legacy of their ancestors and making their home and garden a priority, Darien is under no illusion that what she’s doing is a one-size-fits-all formula for a happy life. Instead, she shares her family’s story in the hope that others will use it to dive into their own version of comfort and happiness. “It’s just thinking about what you value,” she says. “Maybe you live in a city, and what you value is being close to friends and family—your community. And so that’s what you build your life around. It’s just like, what are your priorities?”
Heading into the new era of Pantry Hill, Darien seems to have her priorities straight: Welcome those interested in her story behind the scenes, bring her business to the next level, and reclaim her home for her family. “I do love when my house looks exactly how I pictured it would,” she says. “But my favorite version of our home is when it’s messy and chaotic and there’s family here and the kids are here. That’s the happiest version of home.”