Featured Homes

With its three-level silhouette and pretty stained-glass windows, this hundred-year-old house resembles its Cambridge, Massachusetts, counterparts, at least on the outside. The interior, however, is unabashedly twenty-first century. The owners spied the potential on their first visit. “We were living in New York City, but were thinking about how nice a house with a yard would be. We saw the place on a beautiful fall day and that was it,” recalls the wife.

When two designers are given carte blanche, the result is a suburban Boston residence that gives their clients—a professional baseball player and his wife—a warm welcome to New England.

The prospective buyer was understandably wary when he went to see yet another property for sale, after years of searching for that perfect sweet spot in Maine that had to be near deep water. For starters, he couldn’t see the forest (or the potential home site hidden within) for the trees. “I met the seller by the side of the main road—there was no access to the property—and we made our way through the densest woods for a long time,” he remembers. “We walked and walked and then suddenly I saw the blue of the cove, and Sheep Island, then the view across the cove.

A more contemporary floor plan and a fresh new palette rev up a classic house in the Boston suburbs, the better to reflect the lively young family who lives there.

People change all the time, so why shouldn’t their homes follow suit? While a large classic colonial with traditional interiors was well-suited to a newly married couple moving to the suburbs, ten-plus years later the husband and wife—now happily raising three young daughters and a menagerie of pets—needed a better fit for their family’s upbeat, energetic lifestyle.

A home that once belonged to a shipwreck diver becomes a real catch for a California family who looks forward all year to summer on the Maine coast.