This storied property on the north shore of Massachusetts was initially designed by the Boston firm of Winslow & Wetherell as a shingled house. In 1913, Bigelow & Wadsworth transformed the cottage into a chateauesque mansion by encasing it in tapestry brick and elaborately carved Indiana limestone.

PPA was asked to restore the mansion while upholding its historic character. PPA painstakingly restored the original public rooms but completely reconfigured the family areas of the house. The house was revitalized with finishes that were brought back to life and original elements that were salvaged and reused. In areas of the house with little original fabric, more extensive work was rendered. PPA’s approach, especially on the reconfigured floors, was to seamlessly channel the spirit of Bigelow & Wadsworth’s design to fit the interventions with the original. PPA worked with the noted British interior designer, Max Rollitt, whose aesthetic exploited the scale and grandeur of the rooms and enlivened them with a modern sensibility.

For the new outbuildings, including an eight-car garage with a staff apartment and gym, a pool/folly, and a beach pavilion, PPA worked in a less formal vernacular and used local stone. Weaving these structures into an imagined historical narrative, PPA fashioned the garage as a great eighteenth-century barn, the folly as the ruins of an ancient iron furnace, and the beach pavilion as a whimsical building incorporating the spolia left from a prior structure. The park-like, open-flowing land of the property was returned to its historic form by Lolly Gibson of Laura Gibson Landscape Design.