A stone’s throw from a main commercial street northwest of Boston, in an 1850s Italianate farmhouse basks in the serenity of an intimate lot separated from its neighbors by mature trees and hedges. Restrained yet resplendent, the green-shuttered white house with a deep front porch and storybook porte-cochère is endowed both with the reverence of American colonial history and an element of je ne sais quoi that some say only the French are able to conjure. But it wasn’t always this alluring.
“Our client wanted to redo a number of things that previous builders had done to the house and try to get it back to the original,” says architect Patrick Ahearn, a classicist whose eponymous firm specializes in homes that are sympathetic to the past but conducive to 21st-century living. “They also wanted to add a European flavor.” The wife, an artist, is French and she uses the carriage house, formerly a garage, as her studio.
Bringing 19th-century character back to the four-bedroom abode required “reimagining it as a kind of country house,” says Ahearn. “The transformation was dramatic, but we did not have to rip the whole house apart. We really didn’t add on to it, we just revised every surface and every space as well as the landscaping.” Ahearn has built or renovated a number of houses on Martha’s Vineyard, where the owner of the Belmont antique has a second home. Calling Ahearn’s ability to restore historical homes “genius,” the homeowner says she wanted some of that “Vinyard-esque” flair in her mainland home.
Interior walls clad with beadboard in the renovation evoke classic New England cottage style as do the antique beams in the kitchen and that room’s cabinetry, which, says Ahearn, “looks as though it could have been original to the house.” Reworking the main floor interiors allowed the architect to fashion a charming inglenook off the kitchen with an arched opening and built-in banquette seating. An oval window—a shape that is repeated elsewhere—lends a European feeling to the cozy space.
The homeowner’s favorite place to relax in winter is the front living room, which has a fireplace, crystal chandelier, built in bookcases, and overstuffed Napoleon III chairs on an antique silk rug—all in her preferred palette of maroon, green, and gold.
With the erstwhile garage now an artist’s studio, the porte-cochère takes on more meaning functionally and is more of a presence aesthetically than when it was a previous builder’s flimsy add-on. Ahearn explains that “we made the porte-cochère’s columns more significant, creating a lot more weight to it.” The flat-roofed structure sports new transom glass, a nod to history that ties in with the transom glass above the French doors in the family room. Similar to the thrice-repeated oval window shape, it’s an example of how, Ahearn says, he “tried to take some of the architectural elements and use them in more than one way.”
The most striking transformation is at the rear of the house. Previously, there was only a small deck with a handful of stairs abruptly ending on the back lawn. Now, five sets of French doors open out from the family room inside to virtually another one outside—a generous covered porch with a pair of skylights and, at one end, a wood-burning fireplace surrounded by comfortable patio furniture. The result is indoor-outdoor living at its most sublime. Positioned just one step down from the indoors and one step up from the lawn, this hybrid area facilitates a smooth transition from house to porch to yard.
Easy passage from one outdoor “room” to another underpins the conceptual courtyard design of the back yard, a space that landscape designer James Douthit says was essentially bricks and lawn when he first saw it. “It’s amazing how stark and bare this was,” says Douthit, owner of A Blade of Grass landscape design and construction firm. “Now, it’s like a park.”
A park in Paris, he might add, as much of the driveway’s former brick paving was replaced with pea-stone gravel edged with cobblestones, a là the Tuileries, say. Antique granite steps lead from the driveway to a mown allée, which unfurls directly from the back porch to a hedged-in parterre with a checkerboard pattern of grass and stone and a decorative planter in the middle that was once an antique fountain.
These outdoor vignettes “create moments,” says Ahearn, “like the little café table and chairs that become another secondary but important space right off of the homeowner’s art studio.”
A priority for the clients was privacy from their neighbors. To the very few trees existing—one an old, enormous copper beech—Douthit added maples and birch trees, and spring-blooming pear trees lining the driveway. He used boxwood for formal hedging and hemlocks in places where a more natural look was called for. To introduce color into the fairly shady yard, Douthit says that he opted for a lot of “tried-and-true” shrubs like white viburnums, hydrangea paniculate, and spirea, and perennials including catmint, salvia, vinca, astilbe, and lilacs. Planter beds along with the low brick walls visually connect the carriage house and the main house.
“I want this house to sing,” said the homeowner at the start of the project, little knowing that in fact she’d get a symphony. “It all came together beautifully, perfectly.”