Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/579535
130 Natural materials like rough-hewn stone, plain wood, and handmade clay tiles keep the house authentic. Andrew Spindler Antiques & Design, 163 Main St., Essex, 978-768-6045, spindlerantiques.com Spindler made changes to the house to enhance the indoor-outdoor connection: Installing French doors in the living room, enlarging the window in the kitchen that overlooks the Japanese-inspired garden of Spindler's design, raising the back terrace with granite blocks to make its floor even with the house's. "I love the stone terrace and just being able to con- nect to it and be aware of it," says Spindler. In the sum- mer, he throws open the living room's French doors and installs screens in the adjacent enclosed porch. "You don't even have to be outside to be in the garden." Even upstairs, the outdoors is ever-present. From the windows and the balcony that extends the length of the house, vistas of sea and sky sweep the eye across the garden and out to the horizon. "The interiors are wonderful, but when you walk into these rooms, it's like a moth going to a window where there's light," says Spindler. And the solid, naturalistic sensibility of the house itself reflects the textured, craggy space outside those windows. Inside and outside, the materials of this home's construction are drawn straight from nature without embellishment: rough-hewn stone, handmade clay tile, unadorned wood. It's a house that feels organi- cally connected to its surroundings, as dramatic and simultaneously quotidian as the boulders it graces. "I love the grandeur of [the house], but it's not pre- tentious," says Spindler. "It has a power, but it's really natural and really honest." See page 176 for resources