Westbury Manor

The five acres of gardens behind Westbury Manor are not a landscaping decision. They are what John R. Hill kept in 1910 when he sold the other fifteen to a rose nursery, and the Manor has been working that same footprint ever since. Six event rooms, a Victorian house with an 1880s core, and not one published price. The gardens are the reason people book it.

The five acres are a leftover, and that is the good part

The Manor’s own history tells it this way. The house was built in the early 1880s by the Titus family, descendants of Quaker settlers: eighteen rooms and a stable on twenty acres. In 1910 John R. Hill bought it from George P. Titus, put in street water, new baths and a garage, and sold fifteen of the twenty acres to the Westbury Rose Company. He kept five.

That is the number the venue markets today. Not five acres assembled by a caterer with a budget, but the residue of a land sale made before the First World War. That is why the mature plantings look the way they do and why nobody has ever built anything else on them. The Hill Room, at 1,698 square feet and a stated 40 to 100 guests, is named after him; their rooms page dates his ownership 1910 through 1945.

Every owner since 1946, in order

The Fersan Corporation, run by August Sandi and his brother-in-law Pierre Ferro, converted the house into a restaurant called the Westbury Manor in 1946, and the early clientele came off the United Nations circuit and out of Roosevelt Raceway. Carl Hoppl took it over in 1961. The Scotto Brothers ran it from 1982 to 2004. In November 2004, per the Manor’s own about page, Vincent Scotto and his sons took sole ownership, with Jerry Scotto as general manager since.

Eighty years of continuous operation as a restaurant and event house is not nothing on this island, where rooms get sold, rebranded and gutted on a fifteen-year cycle. It also explains the register of the place. This is a house that learned to run parties before it learned to run weddings.

Six rooms, and only three carry a number

Their rooms page presents six event rooms. The Manor Room is the big one at 4,267 square feet and up to 300 guests, with a built-in bar and a wooden dance floor, opening onto the garden. The Garden Room is 1,928 square feet, mahogany walls, plaster reliefs, Victorian-style sconces and French doors, and it carries no published guest count at all. The Hill Room is 1,698 square feet and 40 to 100.

The other three publish nothing measurable: the Executive Suite with its Ionic columns, marquetry floor and open-air veranda, the Library with a fireplace and garden views, and the all-glass Conservatory. They give neither square footage nor capacity. A seventh space, the Photo Studio, is a photography room rather than an event room, which is the sort of thing that gets miscounted. There is also the Polo Lounge on site, which operates as its own bar and restaurant.

So if a room is being pitched to you as holding a specific number and it is not the Manor Room or the Hill Room, that number came from a salesperson, not from anything the Manor has printed. Get it on the contract.

What they will not tell you until you are sitting down

No pricing. None. Not a starting per-head, not a facility fee, not a minimum, not a deposit, not a seasonal grid. We looked through the site including the package builder and the corporate menus. That is a choice, and it is a common one in Nassau, but it means every comparison you make is against a room that will quote you and a room that will not.

The counter-move is simple and it works. Ask for the same date, the same head count and the same menu tier in writing from three Nassau houses, and compare the line under the food price rather than the food price. Our cost calculator exists for exactly that arithmetic, and the pricing page has what we have been able to source county-wide.

One last practical note about the gardens, since they are the actual product. Their rooms page mentions peacocks in the garden area off the Manor Room. Peacocks are loud. If your ceremony is outdoors and your officiant is soft-spoken, that is a real question and not a cute one.