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For my first crab orgy 10 years ago, I invited restaurateur and chef Michael Tarantino to dinner along with 12 other friends. Michael started the ritual of making a crab sauce with pasta as a first course. (The crab shells give the sauce flavor when cooking. The meat is removed from the shells and added to the sauce.)
Whenever Mary Stone is at her century-old home on the peninsula of Old Black Point, she feels blue. But for her, feeling blue has a different meaning. “I love old blue paint, I love indigo, I love any shade of blue that reminds me of the water,” she says. From virtually every room of her house, the wide expanse of Long Island Sound, often complemented in the summer with a blue sky, is in full view. So, when Stone and her family—which includes her husband and three 20-something children-—are there, they are happy.
Enter, stage left, a barn; now a two-bedroom, one-sleeping-loft guesthouse with sweeping views overlooking the lake and a striking amount of open space. “They wanted a place where guests would feel comfortable, and not like they had to perform,” Bartle says. “And they wanted to do it economically and in such a way that they could take advantage of the view of the lake.” Because the couple didn’t have a specific look in mind, Bartle and his design partner Ken Lake started from the social and moved toward the aesthetic, keeping in mind both the spoken and unspoken requirements.
Jane Capellini’s bucket list doesn’t include jumping out of a plane, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or trekking to the South Pole. Her list is all about houses—the ones she dreams about living in some day. She has crossed off a stone farmhouse in New Jersey, a Tudor in Greenwich, a townhouse in Manhattan, a villa in Tuscany, a loft in Dumbo and, now, a river cottage in Connecticut.
Everyone dreams about having a weekend house on the beach. What they don’t dream about is sandblasting bedrock to make way for a foundation or selecting materials that stand up to a constant assault of wind and moisture, or worrying about how to make it attractive enough that your teenage daughters will deign to join you on the weekends. Architect Julie Schaffer thought about all that and then some when she decided to break ground on a 1.4-acre beachfront property in Guilford. But mostly she thought about those girls.
From alfresco Shakespeare productions to automobile races, Connecticut’s cultural calendar is crowded between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Even the tiniest of towns have summer-fun events, many of which you can walk to. To celebrate them, we’ve chosen six lovely listings that will put you in close proximity to these pleasures and pastimes.
Stocking your summer retreat for the season just got a little easier, thanks to this roundup of attractive, practical pieces that will make you feel right at home.
It’s not just about pouring a fine vintage at your summertime soirees.
Despite having its own private beach and wraparound views of Peconic Bay, the five-bedroom, 8,000-square-foot mid-20th-century home at the edge of a peninsula had been languishing on the market forever. The structure’s slapdash exterior and gloomy interior spaces—heavy mahogany woodwork and crown molding, red wallpaper, brass chandeliers, and view-obscuring mullioned windows—had discouraged buyers for years. Then the recession gave the listing a little nudge forward.
Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian are launching their shop, Dash, this summer on the East End. Perhaps they’ll consider renting Sandcastle in Bridgehampton. The price tag: a mere $1 million a month.