Planning for the future, a Massachusetts couple creates an Ogunquit family haven It was a vision into the future,” says Melissa Serlenga of the Ogunquit home she and her husband, Jason, built for their family of two girls and a boy, ages 11 to 17. By this, she means a 4,900-square-foot, six-bedroom legacy retreat that will evolve into a multigenerational getaway as their children grow and start families.

Colby Chase—vice president of Chase Construction, which the Serlengas hired to build the home along with architectural designer Matt Banow—says, “The house on the lot was a very charming 1920s cottage that needed repair beyond what was feasible.” So they razed it and started from scratch. “I pictured a simple house because that’s what you see in Maine,” says Serlenga, who lives full-time with her family in a Boston-area suburb. “I wanted it to flow naturally with the neighborhood.”

Banow’s design response was historically driven. “Stylistically, we took a lot of cues from the work of John Calvin Stevens,” he says, referring to the architect who brought innovation to the shingle style and designed over 1,000 residences in Maine during his lifetime (1855–1940). Banow enumerates some of the hallmarks he adopted from Stevens: “large, prominent gables, double-hung windows, and a lot of stonework.”

Programmatically, explains Chase, “Their big thing was going to the max in terms of entertaining, with large common areas and lots of bedrooms.” Banow adds that central to the design was “creating a private family zone focused on the pool, and physically and visually connecting the spaces to it.” Placing the main house and pool house perpendicularly to create an “L” and connecting them by a bridge on the second floor achieved the desired degree of seclusion from neighbors.

This required a lot of ingenuity, remembers Chase, specifically in terms of how water interacts with all those spaces and drains properly. “There’s lots going on there,” he notes. “The rooflines aren’t the same. When you walk out of the [second-story] primary suite sliders, you’re lower than the [first-story] roof, so we had to pitch the rubber-lined ceiling under the decking without making it look like there was a pitch to anything.”

Banow repeated the “L” idea with the garage on the street-facing front side to create a courtyard effect. Landscape designer Dan Gogan helped link the property to its setting by carrying over azalea and rhododendron plantings “that flow through as one design between this property and the one next door.” He built a 10-foot-wide bluestone walkway to the front door and, in the beds on either side as well as elsewhere, combined specimen plants such as hydrangea, columnar hollies, and Styrax bushes. Gogan sprinkled in “a lot of ornamental grasses, sedums, and other plantings that fit the beach setting.”

The bigger issue, however, was the steep incline of the land, especially at the study end of the house to the southwest. “That side door had an eight-foot drop to the ground, with an oak tree they wanted to save,” Gogan recalls. The study also offered a slice of water view that had to be preserved. So he designed a retaining wall that creates a patio that wraps around the house from the study to the pool area out back.

Inside the front doors, the traditionally leaning structure quickly fast-forwards to the twenty-first century, starting with the unconventional floor plan. Customarily, the dining room and living room flank the foyer. True to form, the living room, with a bluestone slab fireplace, is indeed to the right as you come in, facing the road and accessing a patio and firepit outside. Uncharacteristically, however, on the left lies the kitchen, which is open to a family room and connects to a screened porch, all of which face the pool. “I consider the right side the winter side of the house, and the left the summer side,” says Serlenga.

“Structurally,” elaborates Banow, “we had a lot of wide-open spans, so we had to use a lot of steel beams.” This support system occurs especially all along the left side of the house, including a 16-foot-long slider that opens from the family room onto the pool.

Serlenga operated as interior designer, taking inspiration from a kitchen she had seen designed by Los Angeles–based Emily Henderson in natural wood, black, and white. “The color scheme ended up being a huge inspiration for this project,” she says. Her palette took material form in white oak, white-painted nickel board, and black accents. The materials are consistent throughout the house but vary from room to room. For instance, nickel board swathes the walls of the primary suite, but in one of the girls’ bedrooms the nickel board covers the ceiling instead, while the walls are covered in a sandcolored grasscloth.

“It’s just a hobby,” says Serlenga about her interest in interior design. “I did a couple of projects before this one—a redo of our house in Massachusetts and a flip of the house next door.” Clearly those experiences emboldened her to make some self-assured choices with finishes, particularly in her selections of tile. In the primary suite, for instance, large-format marble tile covers the walls, while the shower floor features smaller hexagonal tiles; half are gray-veined white marble, and the other half are a honey-colored stone. The rest of the bathroom floor is yet another hexagonal tile (this one larger and more elongated in shape) with brass inserts that form starbursts. The same goes for a guest bath, where Serlenga mixed gray hexagonal tiles on the floor, black hexagonal penny tile on the shower floor, and white chevron-patterned tile on the shower stall’s walls.

Most spectacularly, however, she dressed the kitchen island and the backsplash with slabs of a dramatic Dalmata marble, pairing it with a mix of modern white oak and black cabinetry built by the Webhannet Company, Chase Construction’s cabinetry division. So much black in the kitchen initially gave Serlenga pause, she admits. “I hesitated with the upper cabinets because I wanted it to be light and beachy.” But in the end, the color worked well enough that she repeated it in a wet bar built into the dining room.

Lastly, Serlenga says, she deployed textured fabrics on furniture and, more important, on walls—the sandy grasscloth in one of the girls’ rooms and a tweedy wool in the dining room, for example. “My previous projects had a lot of plaster walls, which were kind of plain,” she says. “Adding this feature makes the structure a decorative place in itself.” It also warmed the open-plan spaces, creating a sense of intimacy that supports family togetherness by creating a cozy feeling even when the house is filled with guests. “We hang out in every room,” Serlenga concludes happily. “We can accommodate everyone, but it doesn’t seem cavernous. We accomplished making it a generational space people will come back to.”