above: Contemporary Adirondack chairs provide the perfect perch for taking in the views of Buzzard’s Bay.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JANE BEILES
Not every couple can agree on the best place to spend their summers, but one Greenwich family had their hearts set on a tiny town on Cape Cod called Woods Hole. This husband and wife, who have two boys, each had separate connections to the coastal village long before they met. While in college, one of the wife’s friends invited her up to their family’s place during the summer after freshman year, and she was hooked. She spent almost every summer after that visiting this small, historic village, that has ferries to Martha’s Vineyard and was once a center for shipping and fishing, now home to a major institute for marine research. For the husband, his ties to the town stem from his father, who was originally from Massachusetts, and his grandfather, who retired in Woods Hole, which is part of the town of Falmouth. Once the couple got together and married, they started visiting friends up there, eventually renting their own place.
“It turned from a weekend to a week to a couple weeks to checking Zillow all the time to see if something would open up,” he says. Homes here are almost always passed down among families, and waterfront listings are virtually non-existent.
Then at the start of the pandemic, they discovered a gem: this beachfront 1960s deckhouse owned by a family with five adult children who couldn’t decide how they would share it. It was on the market for only two days when the couple bid above asking and became the new owners of this house on Buzzards Bay. Its architecture, a modular style that was popular in mid-century, differs from the average shingle-style home in the area, but that appealed to the couple as well.
“It’s more open, airy and beachy than the typical Cape Cod house,” the husband says. But at the time of purchase, it also had wall-to-wall carpeting, dark wood paneling, old plumbing, a dated kitchen with green Formica counters and baths that hadn’t been touched since the seventies. The family needed help to modernize and refresh the house.
As with their certainty about the best location for a summer getaway, the couple also knew right away who to call on for help with the design and renovation of their new beach house: their friends Douglas Graneto and Wear Culvahouse of Douglas Graneto Design. The pair, who are married, had helped decorate the family’s midcountry Greenwich Colonial. Douglas and Wear were some of the first people the couple met when they moved from New York into town, and a friendship quickly formed. When they needed design help, it was natural for them to reach out to Douglas and Wear, who have complementary skills.
Wear, who was a very well-respected OB/GYN in town for years and delivered babies for many residents, changed careers after the two were married. “My sisters both kept saying that Douglas, who is such an artist, should be focusing on just the artistic portion of the design,” Wear says, explaining how he came to take on the role of chief operating officer for the design firm, managing business tasks and becoming a project manager. He cut his teeth working on the renovation of his own family’s lake house in Tennessee when Douglas was busy with other large projects. The traits that made Wear so popular as an OB translate well to the design trade: his easy manner, decisiveness, Southern charm and ability to connect with people. Clients began to request Wear as their project manager. Douglas says, “He had all the relationships, and he eased into becoming the point person.”
SANDS OF TIME
For this deckhouse perched very close to the water, there were restrictions on how much it could be modified, so the project was about embracing the mid-century structure, updating and decorating to render it highly livable for the family and their friends and guests. “The directive was trying to find all the ways we could to open it up and introduce light and just make it an easy-breezy place that’ll have a half an inch of sand in it throughout the summer and still be comfortable,” says the husband.
Working with KVC Builders and Shope Reno Wharton Architects, Douglas and Wear set out to achieve this goal and design something wonderful for their friends, but they faced a challenge due to the timing of the project. The conditions of the pandemic meant that it was tricky to special-order furnishings or custom pieces. The family also had their hearts set on using the home that same summer, a tight timeframe for getting it all done. Fortunately, the couple have an interest in vintage furnishings, which were more readily available, and 1stDibs soon became their go-to.
“They collect not only artwork but also midcentury Swedish furniture, Scandinavian rugs,” says Douglas. “So, they had a desire to find amazing vintage pieces and that desire for collecting, and the spirit of the house really melded well together.”
The design team uncovered some special finds for the deckhouse. The living room is now home to a vintage Vladimir Kagan sofa, Danish modern teak lounge chairs and a marble side table by Angelo Mangiarotti that was produced in the seventies. But perhaps the most significant piece in the open living room/dining room is the large-scale blue carpet by Märta Måås–Fjetterström. “This rug is unusual in size, and it is a vintage Swedish rug. The depth of color is quite incredible,” Douglas says. For the homeowners, collecting (whether art or furnishings) is not necessarily about decoration but more about feeling a connection with the art and artist.
“I would say my husband can go down rabbit holes and went down this awesome Scandinavian carpet rabbit hole and found Märta,” she says. “We followed the house on Instagram, because the tradition of the designs and the productions of them are so beautiful.”
Throughout the deckhouse, the furnishings seem to blend the beautiful with the practical, passing the barefoot test: “We never wanted it to feel like, don’t go over there with your wet, sandy feet,” he says. Though the boys, ages nine and eleven, have a dedicated lower-level play room with sliders leading out to the yard and water, there’s nothing in the house that’s precious or off limits.
For the dining area, which gets loads of use, the table is one the family already owned, and the chairs are vintage Hans Wegner from Denmark. Another vintage Scandinavian carpet welcomes guests in the foyer along with a Guillerme et Chambron sideboard. Furnishings throughout the house are covered in luxurious indoor-outdoor fabrics that are easy to wipe clean. The bathrooms, which were all-blue and all-green and dated, were refreshed with new materials. The shower size was expanded, but the color palette remained true to the original. Ceilings and brick surfaces throughout the house were painted white, making the whole space appear lighter.
FINE ART
While the art in the deckhouse creates striking visual interest, none of it was selected with a specific room in mind. “They’ll buy things because they love it and then figure out where to hang it later,” says Rachel Carr Goulding of the collecting couple. She is a close friend and also their art advisor, a partner in Ruth Catone Goulding. “They are extremely passionate about it, involved in certain museums in New York.”
After spending time with the couple at galleries, Rachel observed that they had an interest in figurative landscape, and most of the pieces in the deckhouse reflect that. The art also seems to speak to the proximity to nature, with a quad of chromogenic prints of olive trees on one end of the living/dining area and a large blue-toned oil painting of clouds on the other.
“Living with the art is one of the joys of it,” the wife says of their passion for collecting and connecting with art. She and her husband follow certain artists and buy pieces as they become available, creating a collection with lasting value. The art also welcomes them back to a favorite place and season.
“We spend primarily the summers in Cape Cod,” she says. “When we’ve had time away from it [the art], it’s so comforting to come back and see it.”
Though both of these bathrooms were fully remodeled and outfitted with clean, modern fixtures, the designers chose materials that would retain the original color that dominated each room. So, the house still has its signature blue and green bathrooms.
SUMMER SOCIAL
This family loves to entertain, and “the tempo of the summer,” she says, is to have friends always coming and going. And they’re ready to feed a crowd, as the husband is an enthusiastic cook. In the updated kitchen, a slew of antique copper pots hangs from the ceiling and are in constant use. The collection represents only a small part of the copper cookware he owns, Wear says.
Because Douglas and Wear are friends of the family, they have been able to spend time enjoying the space they designed. “We’re fortunate enough to have attended one of their dinner parties that started off with dinner for five people and became dinner for 30,” says Wear. They did it “without even batting an eye, and it was just no stress and very organic. It was wonderful.” Fried chicken is one of his specialties, the wife says of her husband, who’s often “cooking up a storm,” as well as putting together dishes that use vegetables and herbs from the garden outside and farms nearby—anything that can be scaled to a crowd.
Some of the guests include the younger generation, and their boys love to host sleepovers. Their favorite hangout spot is the downstairs TV room, with its cushy bean bag chairs and space to invite multiple friends. “That’s just heaven to them,” she says, describing their carefree lifestyle on the Cape. “We love the freedom that they have to just hop on their bikes, go down to the beach, to find crabs, to watch the sunsets.”
It’s the type of place where people from all around will gather on the beach to stop and watch the sunset together. And the location of the deckhouse means that the family can easily join.
“The house is more special location-wise than we even realized. It’s in this little cove that has a public beach that people will go to primarily to walk their dog, and so you’re constantly in the community saying hi to people who are coming to the beach, taking swims out there in the morning, seeing kids on field trips from the science school,” she says. “It’s a very social place to be in the summer.”