“I wanted to make sure I captured that salty air,” says AD100 designer Victoria Hagan about her work on a classic shingled house built in the 1700s by a prominent local family on Martha’s Vineyard.
Not long ago, it was acquired by a New York–based couple who are longtime clients of Hagan’s. They fell in love with the place for its simplicity as well as for its spectacular beachfront location in Edgartown. Hagan was equally enamored as soon as she saw it.
“We were all so excited,” she recalls. “So I thought, I have to handle this very carefully. It’s so special. They loved the oldness of it, and there’s a quirkiness to it. It’s this little old house with many replaces—a cottage from another time.”
That said, it had to be brought up to speed to accommodate the wonts of the couple’s three active children and their assorted houseguests. Hagan collaborated with architect Boris Baranovich, with whom she also designed the family’s main residence. “That house is totally different from this one,” Hagan says. “It’s much grander in scale. This house is tiny— but it lives big.”
The key element here is an addition she and Baranovich designed. “It was done with very careful hands, so it feels very natural to the house,” she says. “It’s the connector. It bridges the 18th century to the 21st,” she notes of the structure, which contains a soaring, sun-washed, pine-beamed family room, which opens to the pool. With a big television, a custom oak table, and wicker chairs, it’s perfect for easy days and nights. Upstairs, the spacious master bedroom is equally bright, and blessed with dreamy views of Nantucket Sound.
Outside, SMI Landscape Architecture worked to ensure a similarly seamless blending of past and present. Irregular bluestone flagging leads through the white gates to the front of the house, where the garden includes a thornless honey locust along with rows of American boxwood and blue hydrangea.
Inside the original house, Hagan wanted her work to be as unobtrusive as possible. “I felt the soul of Edgartown here, so I was really quite respectful of that.” To that end, she kept all the existing millwork and restored the painted floors.
The entry hall, with its soft barrel-vaulted ceiling, was a total gem. It just needed a little adjustment. The original front door was in a corner, which felt odd for today. The new entrance she designed, with French doors, is centered. “Now the house just unfolds so easily from here.”
Its several sitting rooms and numerous bedrooms are low-ceilinged, cozy rooms furnished with many pieces Hagan found on the island. Yet many of her choices—Windsor chairs, an American spindle settee, and an I-beam pedestal table— have a spareness that still brings in a contemporary breeze.
Throughout, she used historical paint colors—shades of blue, khaki, and green. “There’s very little white,” she says. “It’s not your typical beach house.”
She also retained the original kitchen, restoring its blue-and-white painted floor and traditional cabinets. The lighting is all surface mounted. No recessed lighting here. “This is not one of your open kitchens,” she says.
“I do so much contemporary work now,” she elaborates. “This was the complete opposite, but I approached it the same way I approach a contemporary house in that I asked, How do my clients want to live? And I always feel that a sense of the past informs the future.
“I grew up going to Nantucket in the summers, so this was sort of like going back to my roots,” she adds. “Though of course I didn’t tell anyone from the Vineyard I was from Nantucket.”
The homeowners are thrilled with the result. “Victoria listened to us, and she listened to the house,” says one of the clients, the wife, in conclusion. “She gave both exactly what was wanted.”
