“First, there was a simple two-story Cape, built in the 1960s at the end of the causeway that leads across Deveraux Beach to Marblehead Neck. The house itself was unassuming, but the Atlantic Ocean lapped against 425 feet of private beach frontage in the backyard, and the views looked toward the Boston skyline. Then, in the 1980s, the addition of a two-story great room nearly doubled the size of the house. The next addition, placed beside the great room, consisted of a new kitchen and an upstairs master bedroom suite. Living space above the garage, last in the string of additions, brought the house to its present size, nearly 5,600 square feet.
Though spacious, the house was an awkward assemblage of rooms. “None of the added pieces related to what was already there,” says Dee Elms of Elms Interior Design of Boston, who with her partner Andrew Terrat worked to make the house more coherent. ‘It was hard to get from the parking area to the front door. We took four different additions and made them go together.'”