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Photography by Anne Matheis
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A nantucket cottage-style room.
Peter and Marcia Martin are crazy about St. Louis. Born and raised on the East Coast, they came here in 1990. And like all great immigrants, they combined the best aspects of their heritage with their new world. After buying one of the oldest farmhouses still standing in Town & Country, they spent the next 15 years mining their memories of the atmosphere they'd grown to love after a honeymoon and several trips to Nantucket. Gradually, they transformed their house into a perfectly proportioned Cape Cod cottage.
Now they have both—the look of Nantucket in a Midwest farmhouse. "St. Louis has it all over Nantucket," Marcia says. "It has a nice comfortable family feeling." Paul, now a teacher at Principia, grew up on a Pennsylvania farm; Marcia, an artist and teacher, was born and raised in Connecticut. But it was Nantucket that stuck with them.
To bring the shore to the heartland, the couple enlisted the help of two architects who, in Marcia's words, "were worth every penny." The transformation was a gradual process. The earliest revisions came at the ends of paintbrushes—and not just the wide-stroke variety. Ever the artist, Marcia started painting the walls with delicate vines that snake from one room to another. In the decorating, she treated the house as a whole and applied a rigorous color palette of blue and white.
It's all in the details: a blue-and-white pitcher bought in Nantucket sits tucked in a bookcase in the living room, and a Willow Ware vase graces the sunroom. Yellow—the notable exception to the two-tone color scheme—shows up in accents that warm the living room and sunroom and as a broad splash in daughter Lara's bedroom. Outside, Marcia was equally disciplined in her garden, unifying a plethora of plants by limiting their colors to pink, blue and white.
When the roof sprang a serious leak in 1996, the Martins undertook their first major addition. "We drew up what we envisioned on a little piece of paper," says Marcia. They showed it to architect David McLean, the parent of one of Marcia's art students. His first move was to change the roofline by building dormers and higher gables, adding more light to the bedrooms on the second floor. New French doors, complemented by triangular windows, furthered the lighter-and-brighter theme upstairs and enhanced the soaring spaces created by the vaulted ceilings. Downstairs renovations included brightening up the living room with a window well that extended up to a crescent window in the attic, a part of the original farmhouse. A new first-floor sunroom married the first and second floors in several ways: Not only did it open up and brighten the downstairs, but its roof became a deck (and spa) off the master bedroom upstairs.
As their house continued to grow, however, their detached single-car garage sank. Literally. Foundation problems forced them to raze the garage and start over—yet another chance to extend the Cape Cod theme. They knew exactly what they wanted, but it was far from your garden-variety garage: a space for Marcia to paint, room for Peter's tools and lawn equipment and a more convenient way to get his riding lawnmower out to the yard. Instead of cramming everything into one floor, architect Elizabeth Panke went up, adding a second floor that became a studio for Marcia. The roof's exaggerated gable offers a wide, open space that Marcia uses for portrait painting and life-drawing classes. Peter gets the first floor. Not only can it fit two cars, but it's spacious enough for a workbench and has the one thing he wanted most: a barn door that swings wide for him to ride his tractor out to cut the lawn.
The addition required the removal of a large tree and, therefore, a redesign of the garden (they were able to move and save every perennial), which gave Marcia yet another opportunity to tinker. They added a new pergola that echoes the one on their roof garden. A lattice screen creates privacy for the sunroom, necessary because Marcia's students pass by the large windows on their way to classes, which are held in the basement. The arbor is draped with a magnificent wisteria vine, which dates from their original garden. The spring garden follows a winding path through lush perennial beds of roses and iris. They also replaced the brick walkway with pavers to prevent the growth of slippery moss, which can make for treacherous walking.
With each transformation of their home, Peter asks Marcia, "Are you happy now?" And she is—until she comes up with another plan. But mending and amending aside, Marcia and Peter now have a piece of Nantucket's best right here in St. Louis. The only thing missing is the surf.
