This Sea Island Home Was Inspired by a Brass Handbag, Seashells, and a Vintage Book About 'Jaws'
The innate need to create a home is something many of us are born with, and it begins revealing itself from an early age. We may have spent hours of our youth building pillow forts (bonus points if you were allowed to have a sleepover in them), sourcing just the right pieces to fill an heirloom dollhouse, or constructing sand castles to house hermit crabs caught on the shore.
Designer Ellen Kavanaugh is one of those people who knew helping people craft their dream homes was her calling even during childhood. Her most recent project allowed the opportunity to reconnect with a dear friend with whom she shares so many of her most formative and special memories that primed her for a career specializing in elegant, soulful homes that embody their surrounding environs—most often near the ocean.
While Kavanaugh has lived in Palm Beach since graduating college, the designer grew up farther north on Florida’s Atlantic coast in Jacksonville, where she and her client shared the same neighborhood, played in the same marshes, and rode bikes with the same pastel sunset as their evening backdrop. The client had dreamed of having a beach house for years, and one day, she finally found the perfect fit in a home on Sea Island, Georgia, a place that shares a similar terrain, climate, and color palette to their idyllic hometown.
She knew right away that Kavanaugh was just the person to help transform her own lifelong dream into a colorful reality. “I spent a lot of time in marsh-front settings growing up, so getting to work on Sea Island is very nostalgic to me,” Kavanaugh says. “It’s just in my soul; it’s very serene and calming to me.”
The house was built by Robert Raley, a prominent architect on Georgia’s Golden Coast, in 1987 (his drawings of this home are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The house had great bones, but it needed modernizing to fit an active family of five that frequently entertains. The entire kitchen was gutted and the bathrooms were given a 21st century refresh, but the biggest change was the addition of a generous covered loggia out back that would allow the clients and their loved ones to engage with the spectacular setting.
“It started with an organic conversation about how the clients wanted to use the home, and here was this amazing view of the marsh, but there was nowhere to actually sit and enjoy it,” says Kavanaugh. “It was only natural to build a beautiful outdoor living space off the great room with these comfy club chairs that would bring the outdoors in and the indoors out in a cohesive way.”
Coming up with an interior aesthetic was equally as organic, as Kavanaugh says her childhood friend is a creative in her own right. The designer walked into the client’s home one day for their first meeting to find her dining table transformed into a 3D mood board with a range of lifestyle pieces from a brass handbag to a collection of seashells to a vintage book about the iconic Jaws film.
“It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen a client do,” says Kavanaugh. “Here were all these random lifestyle pieces scattered across the table, but they gave us the vibe right away. We immediately got a sense of what the house needed to look like: a bit of throwback '70s and '80s glam mixed with this very natural beach house that needed to be filled with casual materials and textures.”
Kavanaugh and project manager Madison Way started bringing the home to life by leaning into Sea Island’s Lowcountry color palette with earthy greens, rusty pinks, natural taupes, and golden hues that paired swimmingly with the home’s ample use of cypress wood. From there, the pair thoughtfully brought in a mix of vintage and custom pieces to help create a sense of retro glamour that feels akin to a well-collected beachfront home on Bermuda or in the Bahamas. While some spaces are sleek and shiny, the house ultimately feels as if it’s been carefully added to over the years by various generations of the family.
The kitchen is a prime example of uniting the laid-back Lowcountry with nostalgic-chic coastal glamour, as it features cabinets that painted a “super soft, barely there blush,” beechwood counter stools, brass accents, and a showstopping iridescent backsplash from Paris Ceramics that melds the best of retro and rugged. The rest of the home is bold in highlighting its surrounding environment, as the other rooms are swathed in palm print and grasscloth wallcoverings, and each space is a treasure trove of coastal-inspired art, decor, and greenery.
“This house touches on all these childhood memories we’ve shared over the years, plus the '70s glam that we saw from our parents,” says Kavanaugh. “Then you have this Lowcountry, casual feel that gives the right mix of everything.”
The designer says that the most rewarding aspects of this project were rekindling such an important friendship from her early years and working within a setting that means so much to her.
“It fills my soul so much getting to work in a place like Sea Island among the live oaks and Spanish moss,” she says. “It’s truly where I came from. We don’t have these colors and textures in Palm Beach, so it was such a treat to work with a friend in this beautiful setting on this amazing home together."
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