It’s common wisdom that well-considered decisions take time. That’s one reason real estate agents and design professionals advise home buyers to live in their new abode for a while before embarking on any major alterations. Bebe Schudroff and her husband gave the process of considering a full renovation ample time … approximately 30 years in fact.

“The house really wasn’t our style,” Schudroff admits of the 5,065-square-foot structure perched on a bluff of Kennebunkport oceanfront, which has been their summer getaway from Connecticut for the past three decades. “But the view was so breathtaking that my husband said, ‘We don’t even have to go inside. I’ll buy it.’”

The house is composed of three connected sections: a middle structure that is parallel with the shoreline and two wings that angle away from the water to partially enclose a circular, land-facing car court. That meant the rear of the house can take in 180-degree views of the water. Yet inside the residence did little to optimize these vistas. “The windows were small,” Schudroff explains, “and there were walls that blocked the windows. Little by little, we added new floors and other things. But finally, we thought it was time and decided to do the whole thing over.”

The couple are collectors of works with a bright, Pop Art sensibility—particularly by Peter Max, who is a personal friend of theirs from the 1970s—and they had filled the house with a good amount of it. Yet the dark interiors did not lend themselves to showcasing the collection as handsomely as their modern home in Connecticut did. “I love everything contemporary,” Schudroff says. “Lines have to be clean. I’m not into decorated looks.”

An internet search led them to Falmouth-based modernist architect Carol A. Wilson, and seeing a project she had done on nearby Goose Rocks Beach sealed the deal. “Carol is just amazing,” says Schudroff. “She envisioned the whole thing as soon as she walked in the door.” “It was an old shingle house that was dark and closed down, with lots of smaller rooms, and you didn’t see the views,” remembers Wilson. “This project was about creating spaces for them to show the art they love, which has a very colorful, graphic sense to it. So we opened it up and painted it white.”

It was, of course, a bit more involved than that. Wilson rarely takes on renovations, preferring to design and build houses from the ground up. “When you start renovating an old house,” she observes, “it gets complicated because you get odd spaces. We had to be cognizant of the existing structure,” which was everything one might have expected from a 1969 home (complete with the olive green refrigerator, Schudroff points out). Though Wilson reused certain areas, such as the sunken living room, others changed radically, none more so than the old formal dining room.

“It’s not a very rational house,” notes Wilson, “and if you know anything about modern architects, we are very rational.” The kitchen and dining room abutted right at the point where the main structure (containing the dining room) met one of the angled wings (the kitchen). The kitchen itself was walled off from the single-story dining room, creating peculiar planar jogs at the corners of that space.

Wilson appropriated the large walk-in closet of the primary suite above the old dining room to convert the space into a light-filled double-height lounging area with two bands of generously proportioned glass doors and windows overlooking the sea. She demolished the wall separating kitchen and dining room, transforming them into one vastly expanded open plan, and she also had enormous windows installed in the kitchen to optimize the light and vistas. The absence of the interior wall now deflects attention from the odd way the house bends back away from the shore, replacing it with an airy sense of continuous, fluid flow.

The second floor, which accommodates the primary suite and two guest rooms (there are another two downstairs), had formerly been accessed by a stairway behind the kitchen. But Wilson designed a new, modern staircase with a metal rail and open risers to ensure transparency for views and situated it at the other end of the house, giving the primary suite private access and leaving the old stair for reaching the guest rooms. This posed a tricky maneuver for Geoffrey Bowley, principal of Bowley Builders, in addition to the rigorous nature of modern architecture, where the desire for clean lines precludes ornamentation that can hide imperfect meeting points. “There’s nowhere to hide,” says Bowley, “no mouldings, no baseboards. Everything had to be coplanar. That puts a high focus on finished elements.”

Another challenge for Bowley was the primary suite bathroom, where mahogany slats on the ceiling continue down walls as cladding. “How all those slats laid out was given a lot of consideration,” he says. “How everything was going to align was done with incredible attention to detail. Every square inch had to be just so.”

White oak floors throughout enhance the sense of continuous flow from one space to the next, and gallery-style white walls make the art collection pop. Another friend of Schudroff, Natalie Marten, whom she had met years ago in the fashion business (when Schudroff was a designer for Calvin Klein), had helped her with the interiors of the Connecticut house. “I knew the house through our friendship, before it was transformed,” says Marten of the Kennebunkport home, where she had stayed on many occasions. “It was very old-school, though the modern element of the art was always there.” Marten saw her task as designing interiors that would allow the art and the views to speak loudest. After all, it’s hard to compete with powerhouse art by Robert Motherwell (another personal friend and neighbor), Andy Warhol, the afore- mentioned Max, Amy Cordova, and James Havard, as well as individual works by Schudroff herself.

“Bebe loves turquoise and green, which was perfect with the ocean,” says Marten. These colors show up in upholstery for custom sofas throughout the house, in everyday dishware, and in ceramic Buddha heads in a bathroom. Some colors were pulled directly from the artworks in individual rooms. For instance, at the nexus between kitchen and lounging area is an Arne Jacobsen Swan chair upholstered in deep purple, which is the background color of a graffiti-like painting by Schudroff above it. The green of a custom sectional sofa can also be seen in the James Havard painting that hangs above it. Much of the furniture was from Ralph Lauren’s prolific collections. The high-gloss polished mahogany headboard with built-in tables in the primary suite is just one example. “It’s a throwback to the 1940s era,” says Marten, which she ramped up with silver elements. A downstairs bedroom that she describes as “an ode to Americana with a beautiful vintage feeling” is appointed with Ralph Lauren wicker furniture.

Within the newly opened-up, naturally lit rooms, concludes Marten, “It was really about taking treasures they’ve collected and loved over the years and creating vignettes throughout the home.”