Designed for entertaining, an island home blends Nantucket style with South Carolina hospitality.

Waterfront Home & Design (Summer 2005)
by Barbara Karth
Photography by John McManus

Hilton Head Island in South Carolina holds a mystique, luring first-time visitors off the interstate, over the Intracoastal Waterway and on to the island. Following the highway down to Sea Pines Circle, they wonder what all the fuss is about. Nothing there, they say. Ah, but there is. You just can't see the buildings.

From art galleries to supermarkets, most structures are tucked behind palmettos, live oaks, azaleas and laurel. Beautiful homes are secreted in developments known as "plantations" and hidden behind manned gates accessible only from roads winding off the beaten path. Those who stay for a while become mesmerized by the lush green of the island, plus its many activities--golf, tennis, kayaking--and casual lifestyle. Warm breezes off the Gulf Stream temper the summers and warm the winters. In the ocean and sounds, dolphins follow shrimp boats heading back with the day's catch.

The retired couple who built this vacation home on the island began with a gorgeous hunk of property in a private community, Port Royal Plantation, with a less-than-lovely home on it. "More of a beach shack," recalls the architect, Mike Ruegamer of Group 3 in Hilton Head. Fortunately, the owners found someone to disassemble the house and sell various parts to benefit a youth camp.

Construction on a new home began, one that became the 2003 "Home of the Year" in a competition sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders. Cape Cod has its identifiable style, the same for the Hamptons. So what is the Hilton Head style? Often stucco with large expanses of glass for the view, but otherwise, it's an amalgam of styles imported by folks who migrated here as the island developed. "Everything from a Mediterranean look to a West Indies look," notes Ruegamer, who did not replicate these styles. Instead, he imbued the new home with the very essence of the picturesque New England architecture that his clients found appealing: stone walkways, shingled façades, oval and round windows and cozy corners.

Wrapping the exterior in gray shingles imposed a Nantucket influence on the Hilton Head landscape. Windows also capture the style. A New England beach house would likely have six-over-six divided-light windows, so Ruegamer topped large expanses of glass with a contemporary version. Circular and oval windows and a cupola conjure up a more fanciful time. An eyebrow dormer is tucked into the roof. Shed dormers are supported with brackets. The design is a harmonious blend of then and now.

This mix continues throughout the interior. Eleven-foot-high ceilings make it possible to have eight-foot-tall doors and still have room for transoms, explains Ruegamer. "If you go much lower, the transoms look small." Repeating the arrangement in the windows "gives a little recall to that New England style." Ceilings are beamed or coffered. Walls are aged, with faux painting or tongue-and-groove paneling, and the floors are a warm heart-of-pine. Moldings throughout are broad and substantial, but not overly ornate.

"The owners like a lot of detail, and given the scale of the house and the height of the ceilings, we needed something to bring them down. We painted the moldings a camel color, which to me is more casual than a bright white," the architect explains of the crown molding.

This interior architecture and design is all about the view, the flow and the couple's lifestyle. The majority of the rooms open toward the water, there is no living room and hallways are kept to a minimum. The most formal room is the gathering room in the center of the house. Here, groupings of furniture in warm rust and caramel tones are arranged around the dry-stack stone fireplace. Although the room is primarily intended for entertaining, its openness expands the homeowners' enjoyment as they walk through to the library, guest rooms upstairs or out to the deck. Like a peninsula, the library juts out toward the sound on the left of the gathering room, boasting three walls of windows and three splendid vistas of shoreline. However, this space obscures a view up the beach from the gathering room where attention is focused straight ahead to the water. The homeowners and the architect find the trade-off to be positive since the couple spends more time in the library. Impeccably detailed cabinetry of pine is combined with furnishings of leather and an Oriental-style rug to create a room with a seemingly contradictory ambiance--open and airy, yet warm and cozy.

The Carolina room, combining kitchen, breakfast room, and sitting room, is not large like a great room, but a design typical of South Carolina. "This is a big house with cozy spaces in it," the wife explains as she calls attention to the sitting area tucked into the bay. Here, the husband sits and talks to his wife as she cooks dinner. "I sit in that area in the morning as the sun rises and it is like a picture. The window frames the view beautifully," says the wife. She looks out to the wind-sculpted live oak, a major consideration in the siting of the house. "I see the tree silhouetted against the sky." Flowing, easy spaces throughout the house mark a major departure from the typical, segmented Nantucket style. In this open interior, the eye invariably travels to another space. At one end of the kitchen, an arched opening over the wet bar provides a view into the gathering room.

From the gathering room to the Carolina room, library to the back porch, the house is designed for entertaining. To date, guests have numbered as high as 52, and all were managed easily. A large pantry, laundry room and potting room between the Carolina room and the garage double as prep space for caterers. This hostess also enjoys entertaining guests at slightly more formal dinner parties in the dining room near the front of the house. It is the one public room without a water view. With everyone focusing on conversation at the table, a magnificent vista just isn't necessary.

After having ground-floor bedrooms in their two previous homes, the couple chose to locate the master bedroom suite upstairs. "We liked the idea of having our own private space," explains the wife. "So when our family is here, if we decide that we are going to go upstairs at nine o'clock, then they can stay up, watch television, run back and forth through the kitchen and it doesn't concern us at all."

The owners wake to a magnificent view of the water through five full-length windows. "From the upstairs balcony, I can look out at the roof of the office, which is really, really pretty," says the wife, taking pleasure in the forms generated by man as well as nature. Located over the library, the office also has three-sided views of the sound and the shoreline. "At first the homeowners panicked," says Ruegamer. "‘You are closing in the corners. We are not going to have a view up there,'" they worried. "It worked out beautifully," notes the architect. "You can see all three ways from those big picture windows." And the couple is thrilled with the outcome.

On the main level, extending from the library to the front of the house are three guest bedrooms, one facing the water with larger closets and a private bath. In the future, the space could be turned into a master bedroom. Now, when the couple's grown children come with their families, parents have a bedroom and grandchildren have a great time sharing a bedroom and a bath decorated especially for them.

Throughout the house, Ruegamer incorporated old family pieces, such as the sofa table in the library, which came from the husband's grandmother. Artworks bought on travels were also injected into the interior design. "Mike was good at working in the art and actually had spaces defined for the art," the wife notes. Just as this Nantucket-inspired retreat expresses the owners' lives, each home on the island reflects a touch of its owner's past, generating an ever-changing Hilton Head style.

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