BEFORE
Measuring about 9 x 12, the guest room, before.
Window treatments are simple roller shades. Beach-y embroidered pillows from Calypso Home nestle in the window seat.
BEFORE
Before: A narrow hall connects the landing at the top of the stair to the “guest wing” comprising bedroom, bathroom, linen closet, and built-in drawers. The proximity of the bed to the door gives you an idea of the size of the room.
Once-vivid-now-faded cranberry lampshades and bolster pillows add a nice pop, rounding out the nautical red, white, and blue without saying “red, white, and blue,” if you know what I mean. In truth the cranberry comes in because by dern I was going to use the pair of red and white embroidered star and crab pillows (I already owned) if it killed me. And look where they end up, adrift in the window seat, an afterthought. But I like them nonetheless, and I thank them for their inspiration.
Today: The built-in drawers at right are given a shiny coat of Benjamin Moore Tudor Brown, making them look like furniture. Leaning against the wall at left is an old fish-drying rack, painted the same brown and used as a magazine rack. The bit of blue peeking out at the end brightens the whole space.
You may notice around the house a surfeit of Staffordshire figurines. Most are inherited from my mother. She loved them and so do I. Tom suggested we make lamps of a pair of dogs. Unprompted I would probably not have done that for this room, but it works in a WASP-y, Bunny Williams sort of way, and I mean that as a compliment both to WASPs and to Bunny. Window treatments amount to simple, white roller shades.
Notes on Guest Rooms and Guests
A while back, Shannon Ables of the Simply Luxurious blog asked me to write a guest post for her on guest rooms, so she gets credit for this chapter. Thanks Shannon!
In my early married (first-time) days in my twenties, when we went to a wedding every fifteen minutes, we went to one in Birmingham, Alabama. I’d never been, but honey that Mountain Brook area is something. Our elegant hosts brought us breakfast in bed. That was pretty dang fab.
The likelihood of that happening at my house is right up there with my doing the Watusi naked in church. Never say never, but just saying.
Bee Cottage is busiest in the summer, when summer travelers means summer company. The more desirous your location, the more likely you are to have house-guests. It’s funny how that works. Decorating aside, a welcoming, comfortable guest room can be created with the simplest of luxuries, even if the room is tiny. What’s involved is more effort than expense, but it is easily accomplished. I find the simple ritual of preparing for company to be very satisfying.
A thoughtfully prepared guest room conveys kindness, caring, respect, and even love. When I was away at school and came home for holidays, I wasn’t a “guest,” but my darlin’ Mama always had fresh flowers in my room. Nothing elaborate—a few roses or a single ginger lily. She saw to it that everything was fresh and fluffed up, with the latest magazines by the bed, and sometimes a book or memento of something she’d enjoyed and wanted to pass along. She did this for our houseguests, too, naturally, and I’ve simply followed behind her.
As for the visit itself, before your guests arrive, give them an idea of the schedule they can expect. If it is a weekend stay, let them know what activities are involved and what sort of clothes they’ll need. If their arrival and departure times need to be confirmed, do so at the beginning. It’s nice also to convey a general idea of your and your family’s routine. Do you get up early and go to a spin class? Take a morning walk? Do you or your children take a nap or have quiet time in the afternoon? This is all good information for guests to know.
When they arrive, give them time to unpack and settle in before you launch them into the breach. Or the beach.
Before bedtime, let everyone know the morning drill. I keep it simple, organizing coffee cups, juice glasses, plates, napkins etc. the night before and then getting up early to make the coffee and tea, putting out some fruit or berries, and croissants or toast. This way guests may graze at their leisure without me hovering. I also may leave a newspaper or two, sometimes with a note as to my morning schedule or whereabouts if it is before nine. While I am an early riser, I am not an early chatter. Guests are free to ease into the day on their own. Sometimes on a weekend it’s nice to take the low-maintenance route on Saturday and then have a proper breakfast or brunch on Sunday, with everyone sitting around the table re-capping the previous days’ hijinks. “Downloading” a friend of mine calls it. “Gossip,” I call it.
The Guest Bath
The good news in the bathroom is that it is large in relative comparison to the bedroom. To save money I kept the existing floor and fixtures. The painted stripes are meant to mimic a beach cabana—unexpected and fun. It’s also a distraction from the room’s awkward angles and dated fixtures and floor tiles.
An old bamboo bookcase found a home here and is used to store towels and other bath supplies. It also gives guests a surface for cosmetics, jewelry, and whatnot.
I splurged (as I did in the master bedroom and bath) on Leontine bedding and towels, embroidering them with my little signature bee. To me Leontine is the Hermes scarf of linens.
Pops of color are added with vintage linen hand towels and soap.
If you must live with a wacky-shaped bathroom or old tiles and fixtures, consider a bold paint treatment to draw attention from the sore points. Painting the guest bath like a big, striped beach cabana is fresh and fun.
BEFORE
The guest bath, before: Old fixtures and black and white tile were deemed worth keeping.
Today: Painted in a bold awning stripe but otherwise untouched, the guest bath is transformed. Vintage bamboo étagère holds towels and extras.
The metal furniture and pouf came from designer Richard Keith Langham’s tag sale years ago. Sunpak outdoor heaters installed overhead were a gift from my new beau, the fellow I met in Chapter 12.
Chapter 25
The Pergola
Outdoor rooms magically increase a house’s living space. Bee Cottage originally had a brick patio off the garden room and a small flagstone terrace off the dining room, with a grapevine-covered(!) pergola. I didn’t dare touch that little piece of pretend Provence, but the brick patio had room to grow. Bee is really all about the garden, and sadly there is precious little view of it from inside the house. A large porch looking on to it is the next best thing; and a covered, heated porch is even better. From April to November, this is the most lived-in space of the house.
In planning, I knew it had to have many things: ample seating and dining areas, a place for a grill, and a retaining wall, or “sitting wall” that can be for seating or for a surface on which to put drinks or hors-d’oeuvres. Ina Garten had carried on about hers when I wrote about her East Hampton “barn” for House Beautiful some years ago, and who am I to argue with Ina? There also needed to be steps to the kitchen door, which handily could be built into a structure for two storage areas. The small landing also serves as a convenient place to put down your groceries or tote bag while you open the door, talk on your mobile, let the dog out, text your girlfriend, and keep from messing up your pedicure.
Landscape designer Jane Lappin and her able associate Adrienne Woodduck drew up a plan to suit the English cottage-y style of the house, in stucco and stone. What stumped us was how to cover it. A wooden pergola with cascading wisteria? A spiffy canvas awning? What proved ideal was a bit of both: a framed pitched roof with a canvas cover, put up in April and taken down in November. As for furniture, the Richard Keith Langham-designed metal settee and chairs and ginormous pouf I’d bought years ago at his tag sale were just right, and the cushions are the very blue of Bee’s gates and shutters. I’m not normally inclined to match like that, but occasionally it’s called for. Ditto with the awning and painting the all-weather wicker chairs. Budget-fatigued, I strung outdoor café lights and called it a day. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. It’s exhausting to try to be cle
ver all the time, not to mention tedious.
Stucco pillars and a low “sitting wall” support a wooden beam roof structure. A canvas awning comes on and off with the seasons.
The pergola and patio as seen from the kitchen door.
Fluffed up for a party. Pillows from Dransfield and Ross.
Storage areas on either side of the kitchen steps create ample flat surfaces handy for informal buffets.
Bee Garden at about year two.
Chapter 26
The Garden
I like how the British say garden instead of yard. If they have a patch of dirt with one blade of grass on it, it’s a garden. It sounds so much nicer than yard, where livestock are fed. As much as I love this house, from the beginning it was about the garden. I’d never had a real one. In the years I’d lived on my own, I’d had only the tiniest gardens, and in New York, none at all. Despite my not having the greenest thumb in the world, I wanted a garden. My mother could stick a coat hanger in the ground and it would grow, I swear. Surely I could learn to manage a smallish but wonderful garden. What’s left of one-third of an acre after you put a house, a pool, a terrace, and a driveway—is manageable. We set to work on a plan before the ink was dry on the sales contract.
At right, the garden, before.
The East End of Long Island boasts the work of many talented garden designers, but when friend and real estate agent Frank Newbold told me about Jane Lappin, I felt she was the one. Frank relayed how once upon a time Jane had successfully re-interpreted the famous Sissinghurst White Garden for his own little cottage, and that was all I needed to hear. Her roster of high-profile and highfalutin clients was irrelevant at best and intimidating at worst; but once we met, all that fell away. She immediately had a feel for what would be appropriate for the property. I wanted it to be correct, but I wanted to have some fun with it as well. She got that. And frankly, I couldn’t afford mistakes.
The original landscape plan as devised by Jane Lappin of Wainscott Farms. Like all plans, it evolved over time, but the basic bones are there.
BEFORE
The western exposure, before.
Facing west, today, with ivy topiaries inspired by those at Hidcote.
The back (south) and west side are the formal parts of the garden. “Formal” as in of form, not as in fancy. Hedges really are the bones of the back garden. Though it is a typical cottage-y garden, it has the structure of the boxwood hedge to formalize it and keep it from being too loose and blowsy. I am enthralled with the work of the Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz, who knows a thing or two about hedges as architecture. Heaven knows if the Hamptons have anything, they have hedges. (Perry Guillot’s brilliant, illustrated Privet Lives: An Imaginary Tale of Southampton’s Iconic Shrub is a treasure, as is Perry.) I don’t have a big high hedge in front like the grand estates do, but I have them in the back (mainly because I don’t want anybody who doesn’t have to to see me in a bathing suit). Bee’s garden had hedges—a little scraggly, but a start. The south border, we decided, would not be flowery, so we wanted the hedge there to be more interesting, sculptural perhaps, a la Wirtz. Jane came up with the design to have them curve outward, like buttresses. The garden benches came from a mountain house I had years ago. I’m so glad I kept them, but for the life of me, neither I nor Atlanta designer John Oetgen, who brought them for me back in the nineties, can remember where they came from.
BEFORE
Side lawn and grape arbor, before.
Today, with raised beds, mostly for herbs.
BEFORE
Before, the east end of the garden abuts directly to my neighbors’ ivy-covered garage, a nice green backdrop.
Same view today, with an armillary made by Gary Hume.
The southwest corner with summer beds in all their glory. Hollyhocks, dahlias, hydrangeas, matricaria, azuratum, salvia, delphiniums, and snapdragons bursting out of a low boxwood hedge.
It is a bit extravagant, not to mention high-maintenance, to have so many annuals, but bless their hearts, they just give and give. From May until October, the dahlias bloom their big floppy heads off and you gotta love ‘em. And no, we do not dig them up and replant them the next year; we just start all over again. Over the years, for economy’s sake, we have begun to replace some of the annuals with roses and other perennials. They, too, give generously.
The raised herb beds seen through rose-colored petunias.
The thing about perennials is that you have two or three weeks of show and they’re over. The trick is planting the garden to have something blooming all the time. Then you spend the rest of your life telling visitors they should have seen it last week. I have a great deal to learn, but in the meantime the garden absolutely makes my heart sing.
The erstwhile bird topiaries were originally made as decoration for the wedding reception I did not have. But I loved the topiaries and not using them made me sadder than using them, if that makes sense. So I did. They were stuffed with soil and sprigged with ivy and weighed ten thousand pounds. That turned out to be a less-than-ideal solution. They have since been defoliated and now await their next destiny. I may just keep them in their original wire form and call it a day. Or I might slipcover them in all-weather fabric awning stripes and put them back by the pool. That would be fun.
The big metal urns came from an antiques shop in town that is no longer there, sadly. I had them in the dining room in my first East Hampton house. The plinths give them a bit more importance, enhancing them architecturally without making them pretentious.
The east end of the garden originally had two pear trees, but they just weren’t doing it for me. We were thinking about a pergola covered with roses or wisteria in that spot, but I was out of money at that point. So we created another “room” with privet hedges, and I added a dopey swing because I just love a swing.
But no one ever used the swing, so in 2013 I got rid of it and replaced it with a giant, rustic armillary I found at the local summer antiques show. I am a fool for armillaries. I don’t know why. The Japanese maples at either side echo the deep red color of the armillary’s rusted iron and give that end of the garden color and contrast. The maples appear to be in planters, but the bottoms have been removed, allowing the trees to be planted directly into the ground.
When planning a porch or a pool, consider how you’ll use it, where you’ll sit, where the sun comes in, which way the wind blows, where the grill goes, and what the views are.
The herb garden is my play garden. A monkey could grow herbs, so even I cannot mess them up. I also plant lettuces and arugula, and they actually grow, and I think I am Frederic Law Olmsted. The twig tuteurs give a rustic cottage-y touch and a bit of architecture.
The grapevine-covered metal arbor is original to the house and like a little piece of Provence. I thought the grapes would be messy, but they aren’t. I use them in arrangements and on the table when entertaining. Remarkably, the horrific Hurricane Sandy of 2012 damaged little else at Bee but the arbor. My neighbor’s apple tree fell on it, and it looked like a giant bird with a broken wing. Thanks to my terrific caretaker Diana Harty and handyman Basilio Parada who fixed it, it is as good as old.
The thing about gardens is that they are never finished, ever. They are never perfect. Yet they are so wonderful. That gives me great joy, and great hope.
The Pool
Before August, the North Atlantic is too cold for my Southern bones, so I wanted a warm(ish) pool. They say immersion in water cleanses your energy field, and I get in it nearly every day. Although on some days the blow-dry trumps the energy field.
There was a perfect rectangle of lawn begging for a pool, and designer Jane was happy to oblige. Between the time we spoke and the time we met—she’d been working on the garden design for some weeks by then—I began to think about the particulars of a pool. Since I was just going to use it for laps and quick dips, there was no need for a diving board or deep end, and my Marco-Polo days (thank God) are over. Make it shallow, I thought, the bett
er the sun can warm it. So we decided that the depth should be 4 feet at either end and 6 feet in the middle.
Ah, the perils of long distance landscaping. I arrived at Bee one weekend thrilled to see the hole dug and the re-bar laid . . . in the wrong place, by about ten feet to the left. I fretted over it something terrible, wondering if I could live with it. I couldn’t. Ouch. Thank goodness the concrete wasn’t poured yet. They say everything happens for a reason, and in retrospect I wonder if the pool gods were trying to tell me to make a larger pool, which I now wish I had. Mine, at 11-by 38-feet, is a bit short as a lap pool, unless you are 18 inches tall or a very small dog.
In all seriousness, I’ve become increasingly attuned to the potential significance of so-called accidents. Sure, sometimes a goof is just a goof, but sometimes it is a message. I’ve come to see wisdom in wondering about a seemingly random event or mishap, and at least to look at it from different perspectives. Almost invariably there is an insight to be had, or a solution to a problem, or a touch of grace.
The west end of the garden accommodates 5 tables of 8 or 10 for dinner, which is about what my kitchen can accommodate. I try to remember this when I find myself wishing the pool were longer.
This does not explain, however, my notion of installing a fountain in the pool. It is nuts-o—there is no other word for it. Well, ridiculous may be a word for it. Also silly and one-hundred-percent impractical. And yet . . . I hoot with laughter every time I turn it on (even when I am by myself, which is a bit worrying). Spouts shooting dainty arcs of water line both long sides of the pool. The settings are adjustable, beginning with a small arc and up to full-on Bellagio style, which is higher than my head and absolutely preposterous.
The Bee Cottage Story Page 8
