Feature > A Seaside Showpiece
By Anne M. Downey | Interior Photography by John W. Hession
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To get to the Ledges - the Museums of Old York's 2008 Decorator Show House on Gerrish Island in Kittery Point, Maine - you travel down a winding dirt road flanked by towering pines. The property?s eight acres are crisscrossed by stone walls and filled with ferns, and a sloping lawn leads to a private beach on the Piscataqua River.
The spectacular setting is quintessential Maine - lovely, old growth woodland hugging a dramatic, rocky coastline; the sounds of Whaleback Light in the distance - and provided inspiration for the talented designers who transformed the 1887 Shingle-style, Queen Anne cottage.
The Ledges was built as a summer home for Boston lawyer Joseph Bangs Warner, who worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad. The daughter of Warner's neighbor - Elizabeth Scott Garfield, an artist who studied with William Merritt Chase - eventually purchased Warner's home, and the house remained in her family until 2005.
At that point, Steve Kelm bought the Ledges and since then has renovated the home. Kelm's work provided the designers with a clean palette, and he asked only that they leave the white woodwork untouched. Honoring the history of the Ledges and Kelm's request, the designers created rooms that are elegant and comfortable, made to be used.
Honoring the history of the Ledges and Kelm's request, the designers created rooms that are elegant and comfortable, made to be used.
The Entrance
In his renovations, Kelm enclosed the side veranda to create a family room. This change posed a challenge for Joyce Jordan of Joyce Jordon Interiors in Hampton Falls, who designed the front porch that was the entrance to the show house. "Since the original veranda is now enclosed, the front porch is the only outdoor room, and it?s quite a small space relative to the house's size," Jordan explains. "I imagined a family summering here and entertaining a lot, so I wanted to make the space useful on several different levels."
Jordan included a small bar, a console table for food service, and a dining table for meals and playing games. "In order to make it feel intimate, I angled pieces of furniture to soften the rectangular space, and added natural elements like the palms and the ferns. The greenery mirrored the beautiful gardens that [landscape designer] Jacquelyn Nooney installed, and they also helped diminish the wind coming off the water," Jordan adds.
The Living Room
For the living room, Kim Zito and Barbara Vaughn, designers at American Traditions in Hampton Falls, considered the house's setting in every item they chose, from the painted walls to the garden lilies on the side tables. "The room has beautiful views of the woods, the lawn and the ocean, so Barbara and I concentrated on bringing the outside in," Zito says. For example, they chose a warm shade of gold for the walls that reminded them of the morning sun and added nautical pieces, such as the schooner model and the oil painting over the fireplace (one of six in the house).
"We didn't want to take away from the beauty of the woodwork or the views, so we kept the window treatments simple," Vaughn says. Zito and Vaughn added roping to the striped silk valances, echoing the detailing on the large ship's mirror.
The furniture in the room is all reproduction, and each piece is tied to the house's time period and/or the area. For example, the leather sofa is made from baggage leather, which was used extensively at the turn of the twentieth century because of its durability. The sofa's wood sides tie it to the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was beginning when the house was built. The Theodore Alexander chest is made from tiger maple and looks like a piece of eighteenth-century Portsmouth furniture; the D. R. Dimes grandfather clock was made in New Hampshire.
The Dining Room
In the texture-rich dining room, Marcye Philbrook of Marcye Philbrook Design Studio in Kittery, Maine, started her design process with the linen fabric that became her drapes. "I fell in love with the rhododendron- and-bamboo print and the palette, and the room took shape from there," Philbrook says. She bordered the fabric with a sand-colored imitation silk, adding a persimmon cording between the fabric and the border. Philbrook picked up the sand color in the blinds, the sisal rug and the grass cloth on the ceiling.
"There is so much wood in the room, and it?s painted a relatively bright white. So I wanted to bring that down a bit by adding a neutral," Philbrook explains. "Plus, I wanted to provide an informal counterpoint to the room?s formal elements, like the wood and the fireplace. The grass cloth on the ceiling provides texture almost subconsciously - you don't necessarily notice it as much as feel it." The fabric on the walls is also grass cloth, in a vibrant shade of peacock blue.
The portrait over the fireplace added another dimension to Philbrook's design process. "My mother saw a portrait in a book of a red-haired woman in a blue dress - an unknown woman, painted by an unknown artist - and she was so captured by it that she copied it," Philbrook explains. "I think it fits perfectly in this room. I imagined that the woman portrayed had traveled extensively in the Far East and brought keepsakes home to her summer house in Maine, which many wealthy people did at the turn of the century."
In her choice of furnishings, Philbrook mixed exotic with elegant, antique with modern. "I think if you mix pieces, you don?t feel like you're in a museum," she says. The antique buffet was made in India for an English family; on top is an antique Chinese vase made into a lamp. The beautifully detailed, mahogany dining-room table was made by hand in 1830. "It looks to me like an Empire piece, although technically it's late-Regency," Philbrook says. The silk throw on it was custom-made. "I didn't want to set the table because I wanted some open space in the middle of the room, and I liked the idea of my welltraveled, slightly eccentric lady just throwing her silk shawl across the dining room table, again providing a casual balance to a formal room."
Family Room
Finding the perfect balance also was designer Anne Cowenhoven's goal in her casual but polished summer family room. In her case, this meant creating harmony between the stone elements in the room and her fabrics and furnishings.
The original space was a partially covered veranda that Kelm enclosed and expanded, so the new family room includes large stone pillars - measuring two-anda-half square feet - in the middle of the room. "There is so much activity in the stone and in the slate floor, and I wanted to highlight that," explains Cowenhoven of Accent & Design Inc. in York, Maine. "So I kept the fabrics simple, using solids and subtle stripes." Cowenhoven loved the room's view of the water, and chose shades of blue and gray to reflect the sea and to complement the color of the stone.
"It was a tricky room to design because there isn't room for a full-sized sofa, so I created several sitting areas, which would work well for a group of family and friends," Cowenhoven says.
The dark wicker furniture gives the room an Old World, summer-house feel, while the upholstered dining chairs and ottoman provide comfort. Cowenhoven also added antiques to the mix. "I wanted the room to feel like a sea captain might have lived here, and had pieces that had been there for fifty or sixty years."
Cowenhoven also hung contemporary art in her room to great effect. "I love contemporary art in a traditional setting because I like the way those elements play off of one another," she says. Curator Mary Harding from the George Marshall Store Gallery in York provided artwork by local artists, such as Gary Haven Smith, William Irvine and Kate Emlen.
Master Suite
A piece of art gave designer and antiques collector Frank Hodge inspiration, as well as a palette, for his sophisticated master suite. "As soon as I saw the view, I thought of a gouache of Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia that I own; it's black and white with a touch of red," says Hodge, of F. D. Hodge Interiors in Boston. "I needed a palette that wasn't going to fight with the beams, which came Resources from a Portsmouth barn."
Hodge painted the walls with a fifty-fifty mix of white and linen white by Benjamin Moore, and added new, custom furniture and antiques from his collection. The bedside tables, bookcase and coffee table in the Biedermeier style were made for the room, as was the woven-linen upholstered headboard. "I like to use things that can exist in a room from any period," Hodge says, "like the headboard, which adds softness to a bedroom, and the lantern light fixture - lanterns cross all boundaries in design."
Giving the room character and historical depth are the antiques, including an eighteenth-century Italian walnut table; a copy of the unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington done in the early 1900s by George Emler, a student at the Museum School in Boston; and a stately pair of seventeenth-century carved Italian marble urns, whose bases and covers were retrofitted in early Biedermeier style. The Osborne and Little fabric, which covers the pillows, provides the splash of red suggested by the painting of Peggy's Cove.
"Ultimately, I wanted to elevate the idea of a room in a seaside cottage - do something that wasn't kitschy, but that was elegant and comfortable," Hodge says, a sentiment that perfectly describes the results of all the designers' work.
