Eastern Shore or house

The $3 million building was converted into a home in the ’80s—and it has original woodwork and stone walls, a pool, and a huge bespoke kitchen.

When designing the shutters, privacy was a concern, but so was allowing the right amount of daylight in, especially on rainy, gloomy days. Leader and Sarah liked the way the circular cutouts created balls of light that danced around the room.

The 300-square foot living room is located on the main floor and overlooks the front yard; it opens up directly to the entryway and into the dining room.

BEFORE: The exterior of the home.

“When you work with a remodel, depending on how far you want to take the work, you are either careful and consider the existing structure or you treat it as a blank canvas,” he says. They worked with the shape of the building to make it “appear less imposing from the street” as well as clean up the elevations to make them more pedestrian in scale by rebuilding the front porch and carport. The exterior, a blackened sugi ban-esque wood, brings warmth and resiliency, and has an “alligator-like texture to it,” says the architect.

The wood-beamed kitchen features an island built atop a repurposed water boiler.

Nicknamed the Floating Farmhouse, this 200-year-old home inspired one former copywriter to delve into architecture as a living. Inside, renovator and owner Tom Givone mixes vintage and industrial decor. Photo by Mark Mahaney.

Mesdag doesn't see the trees as an obstruction of the view, but a feature.

Located at the end of a winding dirt road, the site presented a construction challenge. “Everything had to be done by hand,” says Mesdag. “We had no machines, we had to dig out the foundation manually.”

A swing hangs from one of the home’s original beams. “It was a gift from friends in New York,” says Onur. “The girls spend hours on it.”

The bathroom in the guesthouse retains the claw-foot tub that came with the property.

A white gravel allée leads to Onur and Alix Kece’s weekend retreat an hour outside Paris. The couple, a pair of creatives, oversaw the renovation of the long-neglected 1892 structure themselves, with Onur designing the living spaces and built-ins and Alix responsible for everything else. “We were looking for something that was in bad shape, a place we could completely tear apart and renovate from scratch,” says Onur.

The home’s expansive backyard includes a pool house with a spa, a grill, and an outdoor living area.

The kitchen is steps from the garden, which grows as an ever-changing backdrop on the far end of the room.

The home is meant to be a gathering place for friends and family, making it so groups of three to 20 can feel at home. A long banquet of seats makes that possible, too.