Step Inside 4 Daydream-Worthy Coastal Grandmother Pads

Now that the property is finished, homeowners Janice and Lee go to the house in early spring to escape the heat at their permanent residence in Texas. The visitors will start arriving and the games will begin. “We play Wiffle ball on the lawn. Horseshoes. Badminton,” she says. Guests come away with souvenirs from the private beach. “Our beach is full of sea glass. We bought little jars, so all of [our visitors could] go sea glass hunting. That’s their going-away gift. The house has so many wonderful aspects… Of all the places we lived, I think [we] got this one right.” —Robert Rorke

Punchy Patterns Abound in Maine

“Have fun with gingham!” said one of the homeowners, a new grandmother, of her family’s worse-for-wear family beach house in Maine. She was offering direction to Connecticut-based interior designer Lilse McKenna, who immediately summoned a mental image of Gloria Vanderbilt’s 1970s-era Southampton bedroom, wrapped in pink check. While McKenna is known for her “grandmillennial” style, she thinks of her record-scratching remixes of classic motifs like chintz and patchwork as a “fresher take on Americana.”

Luckily, the pandemic-era renovation of the 30-year-old shingle-style home required just that, especially since grandchildren—that newest generation of beach-combing, tennis-playing, hamburger-flipping snowbirds that will eventually take over the joint—have recently entered the fray. “I could tell this house was important to them,” McKenna says. “It had been well loved for several decades but needed some renewal to keep up with the growing family.”

Before a glut of gingham could be liberated, the designer required a clean slate. To that end, the original dark fir paneling that had been smothering the interiors was painted white, turning the walls into bright and appropriately seaworthy shiplap. Other architectural updates were completed with an eye toward more communion with the woodsy landscape of red oaks, pine trees, a blight of bittersweet vines, and, as the grandfather clarifies, “No hedges! This isn’t the Hamptons.” The shoreline is just 50 yards from the front door of the beachy rambler. —Leilani Marie Labong

A Hilltop Home With a Breezy Vibe

For a New York couple with a grown daughter, a weekend residence in northwest Connecticut had long been a place of quiet retreat. As this brood added a son-in-law—and welcomed plans for a grandchild—the family decided to expand their nest. After hearing rave reviews from a neighbor about a lakefront project recently completed by AD100 firm Carrier and Company and architect James Dixon, they invited the two studios to reunite—and to turn their hilltop Colonial into a family heirloom.

The furnishings are a mix of existing possessions and Carrier and Company introductions. For these selections, the interior design firm leaned toward materials like wicker and painted wood that exude informality. Their finds also include a pair of 1940s-era Danish chairs that encapsulate, in Carrier’s words, “our approach of making a home feel like it’s been collected over the course of the homeowners’ lives. Here, we had two lifetimes of things to consider.”

A palette of blues is the unifying thread—between renovation and ground-up construction, formal and informal, parent and child, or between a familiar object and a new arrival. “It wasn’t necessarily our pitch,” Carrier says of the overarching hue. “Rather, it was something the family could always agree on, and often their vision was more powerful than my own. It was just beautiful to see it all come together.” —David Sokol