DESIGN by KAREN WOLF
PHOTOGRAPHY by JACOB SNAVELY
TEXT by LESLIE GARISTO PFAFF
When your house is just a few feet from the dunes and a shell’s toss from the Atlantic, the views are everything. No surprise, then, that, on their new five-bedroom build in Brant Beach, homeowners tasked designer Karen Wolf with bringing the outdoors in. She happily complied, granting their wish structurally with windows sufficiently tall and broad to capture the ever-changing beachscape, and with a color palette she aptly refers to as “sand and shore.”
Wolf largely ditched the whites that predominate in so many beach houses (except in the kitchen), opting instead for what she describes as “warm beiges that echo the color of sand.” You’ll find those sandy beiges everywhere, from the raffia chairs in the kitchen and dining room to the patterned dining-room rug to the roll-up shades in the primary bedroom. Blues, offering a sea-and-sky contrast, are splashed throughout the house: in a pair of pale blue sofas in the living room, the wall tiles in the kitchen and the primary bathroom and an azure-inflected grass cloth wallpaper in the dining room. Both blue and beige are used for a dramatic and playful effect in what Wolf calls the cabana room—a pass-through space to and from the pool, designed for comfortable hanging out. The room’s focal point is a wet bar tucked into a custom cabinet of sand-hued raffia and blue-painted wood, topped by a wall of stunning blue tiles in an Art Deco sunburst pattern. (Originally, the design called for shelves to be set against the tile, but the homeowners nixed them so that the wall could shine on its own.)
The wall is emblematic of an overall design that embraces more luxury than you’d expect to find in a typical beach house, per the homeowners’ wish list. “They wanted fresh, classic coastal, performance-friendly, family-friendly,” says Wolf, who notes that the couple have three young children (two 12-year-old boys and a 9 year-old girl). “But they also wanted a little more elegance, a touch of luxe.” As prime examples, she cites the shimmering pendants over the kitchen island and the sophisticated, diamond-patterned tiling on the primary bathroom wall.
The primary bedroom is more subtle— “we kept it soft and dreamy,” Wolf says. Here texture is paramount (nubby linen shades, a Capiz shell chandelier, a dimensional rug), and color takes a back seat to the gorgeous ocean views. It’s the antithesis of the bedroom shared by the couple’s two boys, with its blue grass-cloth-covered walls and wall decorations that include a pair of blue-and-white oars and an oversized sign proclaiming, “On Island Time.” The kitchen is by far the whitest space in the house, with white walls, white cabinets and a dramatic silver-and-white range hood. But the mostly white slabs are veined with a subtle blue echoed in the island base and tile backsplash. “The slabs drove the design,” says Wolf.
Beyond color, large windows helped integrate the ocean and beach views into the house, and those windows are uncovered much of the time. “Most of my clients don’t want to block their ocean views,” says Wolf. So the light-filtering window treatments are designed to recede when not in use.
Befitting a family beach house, practicality here is as important as aesthetics. Good flow was critical to the homeowners, who’ve had a home on Long Beach Island for many years (and in fact, lived in their old house next door while the new one was being built) and knew to expect many visitors on any given summer weekend. “They needed to seat a lot of people and make sure there was circulation,” says Wolf, who notes that she and the homeowners went through several revisions of the layout of the home’s upper level. In fact, what’s now a section of the kitchen was originally slated to be a bedroom. The result is a long, rectangular, open room, whose individual spaces are delineated by wooden ceiling insets, which do double design duty by imbuing a sense of warmth to the room’s upper reaches.
In spite of its many touches of elegance, the house is permeated by a sense of warmth, deriving in part from a palette whose cool blues are offset by its summery shades of sand. And much of that warmth is provided by the sun itself, which Wolf and her team cordially, and deftly, invited in.
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