Becoming more serious about painting is, in fact, how he got into building. He was trying to construct a studio in his mother’s backyard, and a contractor friend who saw that he was using a book to figure out how to do it took pity and invited him to come work with him.

By the late 90s, things began to shift for Kalill, who as a boy had been constantly getting into trouble at school for sketching instead of taking notes. “When I was around 29, I had enough confidence to go pursuing galleries,” he says. He was accepted by the Addison Art Gallery in Orleans, where his paintings started to sell.

Early on his works tended to be en plein air. “Then, more and more,” he says, “I liked slowing down the process and expanding it in the studio.” Others liked that approach, too. He has private collectors as far away as Paris and has been represented in galleries both in Massachusetts and in Sedona, Arizona. To date, his work has been exhibited in the Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and currently, the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. His paintings have also been exhibited in juried shows, including ones put on by the Copley Society of Art and the Guild of Boston Artists. 

These days he does a lot of exhibiting in his own large and airy gallery, Orleans Modern. “I did a couple of pop-up shows, and they went really well, so I decided I wanted to open up my own place,” he says. As bad luck would have it, he opened just before COVID hit. But now the gallery is humming along. Many of his works have a Hopper-esque quality, as can be seen in the sharp-lined boat sails, the houses perched neatly on a bluff, the “pretty intense” colors, as he calls them. One can also see the influence of painter Rockwell Kent in Kalill’s art, with its prominent use of geometric shapes to interpret a subject.

Along with showing his own paintings, Kalill exhibits the works of such artists as Vincent Amicosante, Taylor Fox, Karen Ojala, Christine Niles, sculptor Alen Morehouse, and Frank Gardner. He credits Gardner for helping to put him on his successful trajectory in the first place. For one of his very first winter trips after saving money from his summer Cape work, he traveled to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Gardner was living. “I remember telling him I didn’t know what to paint because I was used to getting assignments in class,” relates Kalill. “He said, ‘Come on out and paint landscapes with me,’ so I started doing that.” 

What’s next for Kalill? “It’s constantly changing,” he says. “I don’t like painting the same thing over and over again.” Thus, chances are you’re not going to see canvas upon canvas filled with sunsets or skiffs rocking gently in calm waters. But whatever it is, it’s going to be good. 

See more of Peter Kalill’s work at his gallery, 85 Route 6A, Orleans, or at orleansmodern.com.

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It was only a couple of years after Andrew Kusmin opened his first dental practice that he fell back into his first love; painting. “I was a good boy,” he says, explaining why he had gone to dental school. “I was expected to be able to support a family.” But he had been painting and drawing since he was in grade school, and he couldn’t shake the artistic urge. So he enrolled in a watercolor course and “knew at the end that I was never stopping,” he says.

“My dental practice was in a barn on the property where I lived,” Kusmin relates. “I made a studio in the loft.” He still worked at dentistry full time, raising two children with his wife, but was “painting night after night, every minute I wasn’t being a dentist,” he explains. By the time he put the latch on the door of his dental office for the last time after 28 years, he already had been having solo shows as a watercolorist and selling his works. 

Today, with his own gallery in Plymouth, he has been a full-time artist for almost as many years as he was a full-time dentist. Accolades include acceptance into such organizations as the American Watercolor Society and Audubon Artists and too many exhibitions and awards to list. One of the two people he credits for his success is his mentor, watercolorist Leo Smith. “Leo didn’t teach me anything about painting per se, except ‘Use more color,’” Kusmin says. “But I didn’t have confidence.” That’s where Leo filled in. “I know you can do this,” he would tell his protege. “He changed my whole life,” Kusmin remarks.  

Not many of Kusmin’s paintings have people in them. But his works, steeped in realism and so masterfully textured that in looking at them you feel you are touching objects with your hands, very often impart a sense that someone is about to enter the scene, or perhaps has just left. There’s a table set for a dinner party with empty chairs around it, a path to an old but tidy Wyeth-like farmhouse, a bicycle on the deck of a tenant house. “I’ve never finished a painting that is of any significance to me that doesn’t talk about the people who were either present at one point or about to arrive,” Kusmin says. 

Sometimes someone is present just by the emotion a painting evokes. He explains, “I look at a buoy and see gnarled hands. I see the peeling paint, the cracks in the wood. A buoy otherwise has no interest to me.” 

Kusmin stopped being able to finish his paintings when his twin sister, Anne, the other great influence in his artistic life, was dying of cancer. They had entered art contests together as kids, and he had always been able to rely on her for an honest critique. “When I thought a piece was finished,” he says, “I’d scoot over and say, ‘What do you think?’ She couldn’t paint. But she could say, ‘Something’s wrong here. Go re-think that part.’ As a graphic designer [educated at Rhode Island School of Design], she had a sense of space, composition.”

By the time Anne passed in July of 2022, Kusmin had been starting paintings but unable to take them all the way through. “I was struggling,” he says. But by the end of  the year, he explains, “I came out of that by realizing that every single thing she ever told me, I’ve got. I knew her well enough that I knew what her opinion was going to be.” She had, he says, prepared him for life without her. 

With that closure, he was able to close on his works, so to speak. Kusmin’s refreshed gallery space reopens in the summer of 2023. 

Experience Andrew Kusmin’s work at his gallery located at 1 North Green Street, Plymouth, or at kusminarts.com.

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“A lot of my work is based on dreams and memory,” Reeves says. “They’re foggy and they’re moving—they’re not static.”

To accomplish the desired effect, she uses materials that she calls “watery”—high-flow acrylics. And, she says, “I don’t really use brushes in the beginning stages. I use gravity and water. I tilt the canvas and move it, or sometimes squish it between another canvas.” She doesn’t tend to start with a set plan. “I’ll have a loose intention,” she comments, “but oftentimes, I just want to get some color down, and then the medium starts taking over.”

Reeves, a Montreal native who works out of the Old Schoolhouse Art Studios in Barnstable, did not come to the Cape to be an artist. She came for her husband to accept a position at the YMCA. “We had no kids. We felt, let’s just try it for a couple of years,” she says. “I had no idea about the art scene.” Twenty-eight years and three grown daughters later, she has exhibited in solo and group shows not only on the Cape but also up and down the east coast. And she has been profiled in numerous publications, including the Boston Globe and Art New England.

She started out doing commercial murals—a trompe l’oeil on the wall of an Italian restaurant in a strip mall that featured a window opening and trailing plants; other murals for the John Carver Inn and the Cape Codder Resort. “I totally stumbled upon it,” she says. “I happened to meet a person who was painting murals, and she invited me to help her.” Then one of Reeves’ sisters died at the age of 45, the year she herself turned 40. “That kind of jolted me,” she says. “What if I only have another five years? What do I want to leave behind?” That’s when she began painting what she felt moved to paint rather than working solely on commissioned projects.

Next came a show that she put on with two friends. “What do those art people do?” she remembers the three of them asking—“the ones who make art for art’s sake. Let’s try it. And so we did, and then we were hooked.”

Reeves doesn’t think of herself as a Cape artist per se. Regional art—landscapes—wasn’t the kind of work she was interested in. She wanted to respond with her art to something other than just the environment—which is why she populates her canvases with memories, family members, takes on contemporary life.

Along with her dreamlike creations, she paints representational pieces and abstract works. “I kind of just like to shake it up and do something else,” she comments. “I want to always be curious and discovering. I want to always be learning.”  

To see what Jackie Reeves has been discovering and learning lately, you can catch her work at The Drawing Room in New Bedford, or shop.anthif.com. Reeve’s Face Time exhibition at Cotuit Center for the Arts, will run from July 29th through September 3rd, or head to her website, jackiereeves.com. 

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The Cohasset native, who has already been exhibited at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, says she didn’t realize anything about her own abilities until people started reacting to her work. Before that, she saw herself as just “doodling over the years.” 

She is not impressed with herself. “In my family,” she says, “it is not unique to have a skill,” referencing both her grandfather, noted Hingham artist Michael Weymouth, and her mother, silk painter Anna Nicholas. 

As for the future, the rising senior at Vermont’s Putney School had thought she might like to go on to Rhode Island School of Design. But now she’s not so sure. Because she is a self-taught artist, she wonders “if it would be more beneficial to go to school for something that I have been less successful learning on my own.” With that in mind, she is thinking of shooting for the stars, literally. 

“I have had a longstanding interest in astronomy,” Nicholas comments. “It’s something I’ve been interested in since I was very young. I didn’t think I was smart enough to pursue something like that. But I’ve had a lot of teachers this year tell me that I was being ridiculous for thinking that. I guess it’s more of a viable option now that I’ve had some people who are familiar with how I learn things tell me that they think I can.”

Wherever she goes, we suspect she will be taking her charcoals with her, along with the watercolors in which she has been dabbling. For Nicholas, whatever directions she takes, the sky’s the limit. In the meantime, you can find her and her work on Instagram @darling_orange_art. 

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You can take the girl away from the Cape, but…

It has the trappings of so many other Cape Cod houses: glorious views out to the ocean, a wooden “Buzzards Bay” sign over the secretary, glass lamp bases filled with shells, a copy of this very magazine on a little antique chest purchased in Sandwich.… But wait! Magenta bougainvillea cascades down a wall in the side yard. Route 6A is nowhere to be found. And the sun is setting over the ocean rather than rising there. What’s going on?

We’re on the southern California coast, about 20 miles north of San Diego. Then why all the references to the Cape in the decorating? “The Cape speaks to me,” says the owner, a retired pediatric nurse. “I’m just mesmerized by the sun coming up over the Atlantic. We don’t get that here. And I like the history there. I like the maritime tradition.”

The story of how this born-and-bred California girl came to love the Cape is a story of friendship. Her youngest children, twin boys, decided they wanted to go to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay. “I said I better go look at this school,” she relates. “I searched and searched for a place to stay and found a restaurant with an inn upstairs called The Beachmoor.” The converted mansion was right on Buttermilk Bay, which is part of Buzzards Bay. 

“We hit it off right away with the couple who owned the inn,” says the homeowner. “The wife introduced me to everybody. I was taken with her warm, wonderful hospitality. And she kept an eye on my boys when they were in school there.” 

The “boys” are now 34, but the homeowner and her husband have remained very close with the Beachmoor’s proprietors, Rita and Rob Pacheco. So much so that Rita and Rob go out to California to stay at the “Cape house” for a couple of weeks every year. “They usually come out here in March/April, when it’s still chilly on the Cape,” the homeowner says. “We go out to visit them in the fall, when it’s still warm on the Cape.”

When they come East, the California couple usually rents a house, where they entertain not only Rita and Rob, but also other friends they made while the twins were going to college at Mass Maritime. “These are people who live in Sandwich, West Falmouth, Bourne,” the homeowner says, “and I usually pop in and say Hi, or we have them to dinner. I like to have a kitchen wherever I go.”   

But their most enduring and tight-knit Cape-made friendship is with Rita and Rob themselves. “Our husbands play golf,” the homeowner says. “They really get along—and Rita and I go to estate sales and get into mischief. And do projects.” What kinds of projects?

“All kinds of crafts projects,” she says. “Things like paper art. And we go to the beach to scavenge around for sea glass, rocks, driftwood. If you know Rita, you know she’s a major collector of anything in nature. We also take little side trips. The last time I was there she took me to a magnificent Portuguese market in Fall River called Portugalia. We bought food and decor from there.”

One Portugalia piece on display in the California home is a blue-and-white-striped ceramic bowl that sits on a kitchen counter. The owner keeps lemons in it that she picks from a tree she planted in her garden. A teapot purchased from a church thrift shop in East Falmouth sits on one of the stove burners nearby.

Doubling up

The homeowner and her husband have actually had their Pacific-view residence since 1987 and raised their family there. They are the third owners of the house, built in 1943. When they bought the place, it was only one story. It had been constructed on piers—vertical pillars with beams on top—so that if waves came crashing in during a storm or if the tide overreached, water would travel underneath and out to the other side of the building. But in 2005, when her husband sent their eldest son under the house to check on the piers, he found the place was slanting on them rather than sitting upright. 

“We had to take the whole house down,” the owner says. In the reconstruction, they followed much of the original architectural design. They stayed with the board and batten detailing on the walls (which works as well with a waterfront setting out west as it does in the east). They also kept the original footprint. “The windows are where they were,” she points out. “The fireplace is where it was.” But in rebuilding, she explains, “we popped up a second floor.” That really opened things up.   

For instance, what is now the dining room, with coffered ceilings and beautiful wood-paneled walls, used to be the primary bedroom. And what was once a galley kitchen now has ample elbow room. There’s also a butler’s pantry with a fridge that has a door to the outside. That way, the owner says, “You can come off the beach, grab a drink, and not go through the house with sandy feet. Caterers use it, too. We’ve thrown a lot of parties here; I raised a lot of people’s kids at this house because they all wanted to be at the beach. The parents would bring me pallets of food to cover their children so I wasn’t always at the store feeding everybody.”

Along with the butler’s pantry, “We also have heat in all the rooms now, and air conditioning,” the owner says. Before, it really was more of a rustic oceanside cottage with all the children crammed into bedrooms at the back. Only the bedrooms had heat, and it was single-wall construction with single pane glass in the windows. “It was cold in the winter,” the homeowner says.

The house used to feel boxed in, too. The kitchen had been closed off from the living room. And there was no easy egress to the back porch and the beach just beyond. “You had to go through a door in our bedroom to get there,” the homeowner says.

Now, inside and outside come together more easily. For instance, whether from inside through large windows framing the ocean or right outside, the home’s inhabitants can see whales breaching in the Pacific as they make their way from Alaska to the Baja Peninsula during the winter months. “We always watch for the first ones routing south,” the homeowner says. The view is even better from the primary bedroom, now upstairs, which has a fireplace just above the one in the living room. The couple can get cozy while viewing the activity in the ocean.

Rita helps decorate by way of gifting her own New England treasures, or scouting for the homeowner between visits. In general, the homeowner is thrilled with the touches Rita has added to the residence. “She has such a gifted eye for decorating. It’s just been so impressive,” she says. 

One of Rita’s touches is the large, round table featuring a historic ship’s wheel under glass in the home’s dining room. It’s a piece that originally anchored her restaurant as The Captain’s Table, a place of honor and distinction for those fortunate enough to be seated there. “She gave it to me,” the owner says. “I used to admire this when I went to hang out at The Beachmoor, to eat there. Rita would do so many creative things with this table—wonderful food presentations, all kinds of spreads. It was near the piano.”

Rita has also helped fill the home with one-of-a-kind pieces, like the grouping of whale figurines that sit atop a ledge on the ornate cased opening between the living room and dining room. Likewise, the two pieces of driftwood art that now grace the porch were gifts from Rita to the twins. She gave the family some of the driftwood art inside the home, too. 

A painting of a clipper ship under the light of the moon that hangs in the living room was a piece Rita had commissioned specifically for her friend. Another clipper ship painting came from a fundraising auction hosted at The Beachmoor that the homeowner attended. Since so many pieces were chosen by Rita or with her help, it should come as no surprise that the homeowner calls her house Beachmoor West. Even the “Buzzards Bay” sign comes from the original Beachmoor.

There are many other Cape-sourced decorating touches as well, including occasional pieces from Acushnet Antiques. One is a little two-tiered serving table with a painting of Nantucket on the top tier. The Windsor chairs around the dining table and elsewhere in the home are also antiques, having been purchased from Sandwich Antiques. “We don’t have quite the wonderful antique shops that you have in New England, which is why I buy out there,” the homeowner says. 

One Cape Cod shop she likes in particular is the Spotted Cod in Sandwich, where she has purchased items ranging from a French glass vase that she keeps on the countertop to ceramic ware and other decorative touches.

The home’s first floor is further made into a New England-like haven with beadboard facing on the kitchen cabinetry, lighthouse keeper pendant lights hanging from the living room ceiling, and blue, red, and white throw pillows with images of anchors, whales, and the words “Cape Cod” sewn into one of them. Some of the home’s fabrics are courtesy of Burke Decor, a home furnishings company owned by the homeowner’s daughter. There’s even a lovely golden retriever named Rosie; the golden is one of the two most popular dog breeds in Massachusetts.

Upstairs, the homeowner has claimed a large, airy landing at the top of the staircase for herself. She calls it Mermaid Cove. Situated in the middle of the upstairs rather than on the ocean side, the Cove allows you to catch the view only if you are standing in one particular spot that has a sight line through a large picture window in the primary bedroom. That’s just the way she likes it, calling the spot her “little area to read, to write. That ocean is a pretty big distraction,” she says. She also likes that Mermaid Cove is “on the second story, away from all the confusion of kids [such as her grand-children] coming in and out.” 

There are plenty of Cape and Cape-like accoutrements upstairs, too, including a cranberry harvest scoop with children’s blocks in it. And the blue-and-white themed secondary bedrooms have Cape-affiliated names—the Maritime Room, the Hydrangea Room, and so on. 

Sometimes when Rita comes she’ll move things around—on her own—or add a new effect—on her own. That’s perfectly okay with the homeowner. She relates that “Rita had a dear friend who on her 101st birthday said the secret to her longevity was, ‘Decorate! It keeps you young.’ I think Rita and I live on that principle.” And also on the principle of a close, abiding friendship and the joy and meaning it brings to life. 

Larry Lindner is a contributing writer for Cape Cod Life Publications. 

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“For years and years, we rented a place,” says the owner. “We did it how everybody does the Cape. We crammed in, air mattresses everywhere, and just had a blast all being together like that. But I was like, ‘Okay, in this house we’ll have the space where everybody can have a bed.’”

“Everybody” is a big list: the couple who built the new home, their four adult children and their four spouses, and 12 grandchildren, for a total of 22. Make that 24. The owners wanted space for two more—just in case.

Architect Matt Schiffer, a principal at Hutker Architects, had his work cut out for him. He, along with associate Kevin Schreur as an essential member of the Hutker Architects team, were tasked with creating a house of almost 10,000 square feet that despite its large size would feel like a hub, a “nerve center,” as Schiffer puts it, where nobody would ever be too far from anyone else. It also had to take full advantage of being sited right on the water, with spectacular views out to the sea and a feeling that the inside and the outside blended together. And it had to read, he says, as “a very storied bluff house.” He had shown the owner a watercolor sketch of such a house by Edward Hopper, and she loved it.

To execute the plan, Schiffer conceived of the house as a T, with one axis starting at the front door on the driveway side and shooting straight out to the ocean. Thus, from the moment you enter, everything is about the home’s orientation toward the water. 

The other line of the T is not what you might envision. Rather, it’s a very intentional grouping of rooms and spaces around that central axis, ensuring that family members will automatically end up crossing paths and being, well, family. There are no wings taking anyone down long halls. On the first floor, for instance, as large and spacious as it is, the family room, dining room, and kitchen are all within view of each other; conversation and coziness keep happening. 

On the second story, the four adult children’s bedrooms, each with an ensuite bath, group around a large mezzanine overlooking the first floor. Everyone has to come out into that central space—with its own grand view of the water—in order to descend the stairs for such activities as breakfast under the garden’s pergola, water sports, sitting around the outdoor fireplace for an evening, lounging on the ocean-facing porch’s swinging bench… 

Even the grandchildren, whose rooms are in a rustic-looking bunkhouse with two bathrooms of its own across a long, windowed skybridge (which creates a porte-cochère below), have to cross that bridge to the upstairs mezzanine in order to make their way down to the family rooms with everyone else. “This house is all about family,” the owner says. Schiffer adds, everywhere in the house is a “communal gathering spot.” (The skybridge floor, by the way, has a steep roll in it, reminiscent of a dune. “That was for the kids,” the owner says. “I could see them rolling balls, taking their Matchbox cars. And that’s what they do. It’s so exciting for them!”)

The top floor, an extraordinary primary suite unto itself replete with an office for the husband, is perhaps the home’s one hideaway. Reachable either by staircase or elevator, it contains a kitchenette that resembles a boat, with a repurposed porthole and curves fashioned from African mahogany. 

Smack in the middle of the primary suite’s water-facing side sits a covered balcony—an iconoclastic architectural element taken straight from the bluff house tradition. From that perch, the owners can stretch in deck chairs while looking out to sea, Martha’s Vineyard coming into view as their eyes make the sweep. While gazing outward, it would be easy for them to imagine themselves at the top of an ocean liner in the middle of the sea; there, one really is king (or queen) of the world.

White as backdrop

In a lesser designer’s hands, the large, voluminous home, with double-height ceilings stretching from the first floor to the top of the mezzanine on the second, could have looked cold and stark in whites and neutrals, cavernous. But in the hands of Hutker’s interior design team, which was led on this project by Mika Durrell, the white-based backdrop serves to help exude a warmth that sparkles brightly. “The owner loves white, particularly white sail cloth, which reminds her of the Cape, and I love layering in white with texture and shots of color,” Durrell says.  

“Color should tell a story rather than plague a space everywhere.” A neutral canvas on the interior also “really allows the outside to come in,” she says, “that blue sky, that blue ocean.”

The owner echoes those design choices. “Cape Cod is so gorgeous and so beautiful outside. I didn’t want the interior to take over…I wanted the outside to come in,” to augment “that sense of enjoyment.”

Having in-house interior design services that work alongside the architects and clients from the first moments of conception allow for a more cohesive and functional design—and one that reflects the homeowner’s style of living. The Hutker team added in the warmth conferred by texture, and a sense of depth, with a number of bespoke, handmade pieces crafted by both local and distant artisans. For instance, Wil Sideman of Martha’s Vineyard’s Eldridge & Co. made the one-of-a-kind lighting pendants above the dining room table. Fashioned of glass and hanging from the mezzanine ceiling by thick chains, they riff off the design of old-school buoys. Their oblong shape also serves to complement the height in that area of the house, Durrell says. For added effect, Sideman created dimples in the glass, inspired by the water rippling. And of course, the glass reflects light, just like the water would.  

The dining table, cracks remaining on top and natural tree lines left in the edges, was crafted by Jeff Martin, a Vancouver furniture maker. He also made the chairs and the bench on one side, which he calls the “party bench” so that all the kids can pile onto it. The table’s central position—right in the middle of the downstairs and directly in the line of vision as you enter the home—is very intentional. “We normally don’t get to eat with each other at home,” the owner says, “so I wanted this really big table to be seen right when you come in the front door. That’s kind of the focus of being together.” 

Another bespoke touch is the railing of bronze mesh keeping everyone safe on the mezzanine. It was designed by Issac Juodvalkis, principal of the Whetstone Workshop in Rhode Island. His mission was to fabricate something that looked like objects you would find on the beach, and the pattern evolved to resemble fish scales. Juodvalkis also made the shower doors in the primary bath. “They kind of feel like old factory windows,” Durrell says. “Some of the panes are opaque, some are open, like old factories in New Bedford.” The opaque panes provide privacy, while the ones composed of see-through glass are strategically placed so the person showering can look out to the water. 

Special artisan touches can be found throughout every room of the home, from the tiles in the bathrooms that were all hand-crafted by smaller companies to the different headboards in the adult children’s bedrooms. Each was made by Rhode Island’s O&G Studio, led by Jonathan Glatt, to suit their four different design aesthetics. 

The contributions of the wide variety of talented boutique craftspeople lends the home the comfort associated with New England houses without making it feel “overly crafty or rustic,” Durrell says. “We wanted to achieve a feeling of warmth while still making it feel clean and serene and organized. That was the dance.” 

Landscape delineations

Outdoors, a land/oceanside dividing line is marked by a long, low stone wall bordered by an actual boardwalk that runs the long width of the two-acre property. “Everything kind of hangs on that boardwalk like birds on a wire, only all the birds are different in this case,” says Dan Solien, a principal at Falmouth’s Horiuchi Solien Landscape Architects who designed all the softscape and hardscape around the home. 

What it translates to, he says, is a journey. Along the way, just on the other side of an outdoor shower curved into the shape of a shell, one sees a classical coastal garden on the water side of the boardwalk and a fire pit with a sitting area. Move on a little further, and you reach the parking court. Pass the garage, and you will come upon a wonderfully shaggy meadow. At journey’s end, Solien says, you’ll find a “kind of Tuscan garden” with a dining area that sits under a pergola, opposite a garden house that doubles as a guest cottage. “You can jump off the boardwalk as you pass the guest house,” he says, “and then you’re on a path that leads down to the beach.” 

Every outdoor detail was carefully thought through and executed across the home’s varied landscape conditions, punctuated by such hardscape elements as the outdoor fireplace sharing a chimney with the family room fireplace on the far end of the home. For instance, the pergola will be roofed by soft pink New Dawn climbing roses when they grow tall enough rather than wisteria because, Solien says, wisteria would have been too dense and heavy for the setting. He adds that “the landscape on the landward side is not particularly coastal in nature because you’re up against a woodland” there. All the plantings on the water side, by contrast, are coastal. 

He also went far beyond the local conservation commission’s requirements for removing invasive plant species and replacing them with native species. “When you sit in the house and look out toward the water,” he says, “you’re looking out essentially over an indigenous coastal landscape—beach grass, bayberry, beach plum, sweet fern…it looks the way a waterfront property should on the Cape. It flows and is soft and varied. It was important to the owners that the house settle into a landscape that was entirely indigenous.”

Are the owners happy with Solien’s work?  “Dan is a genius,” the wife says. “Every morning I walk down the boardwalk and look at all the plants and see how everything’s growing. It’s so relaxing, yet vibrant and exciting all at the same time.”

She is happy with the entire team, in fact, including the builders, Sea-Dar Construction, who sometimes had to back up large trucks almost a mile and a half down the road to deliver supplies because of a low overpass near the site that the vehicles wouldn’t be able to fit under. Sea-Dar also sourced difficult-to-find supplies, including the barn board for the walls of the grandchildren’s bunkhouse. It’s “a new product that looks old,” says Sea-Dar principal John Kruse. “A guy in Colorado makes it. We basically bought everything he had” to get the job done.

As for architect Schiffer at Hutker, the owner says that “Matt was incredible. He would take my ideas and make them into a form. Mika, the same great work. Mark Hutker was pretty involved as well. It was a blast working with the entire team, a neat, creative experience.”

And an important experience, too. The owner’s reasons for building a home for her family on the Cape run deep. She began spending part of her summers here as a little girl, when she would come from out of state with her parents and grandparents and share a rental with another family. As an adult, she says, “My husband and I moved all over, including overseas, for work. But the Cape was always like the anchor for me. It was the one thing that didn’t change. It always felt like coming home, and still does.” 

That remains true even though she now lives 2,000 miles away. The Cape house, in fact, is where the family experiences meaningful memories—wedding showers, other events. “It’s just a really special moment doing family functions there,” she says. 

She is no doubt gearing up for more family functions right now. Two more grandchildren are on the way, and that means two more baby showers. Another way of putting it: Her instinct to make room for 24 instead of 22, “just in case,” was spot on.  

Larry Lindner is a contributing writer for Cape Cod Life Publications. 

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Four women flush with the friendship of schoolgirls come gamboling down the steep, narrow staircase, the warm intimacy of their conversation wafting through the dining room in four different accents as they make their way to the kitchen. Hailing from Austria, Germany, the UK, and the US, they have known each other since their four 28-year-old children were preschoolers. The gathering this time around is because the actress Gail Strickland (whose credits include Norma Rae, Law & Order, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show) has asked the group to come to Provincetown for a three-day workshop of sorts on storytelling. 

They are being put up on the quiet east end of Commercial Street in the eighteenth-century house once owned by the writer Mary Heaton Vorse. Under the roof of the shingled Cape-style home, where she lived from 1907 until her death in 1966, Vorse nourished a forward-thinking exchange of ideas and hosted both budding artists and such notables as playwright Eugene O’Neill, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the left-leaning couple portrayed in the movie Reds, Louise Bryant and John Reed. Today the role of host to both emerging and established artists and avant-garde thinkers is being fulfilled in the house by world-renowned interior designer Ken Fulk. He was asked by Vorse’s granddaughters to buy the crumbling residence, rehabilitate it, and make it a gathering place for creatives and thinkers once again.

It’s a fitting hand-me-down. Fulk is not only an internationally lauded designer but also an accomplished writer himself. He has penned articles for such publications as Town and Country and Financial Times and is just out with a new book, The Movie in My Mind, which gives readers a peek into the inspiration behind some of his knock-your-socks-off interiors. A true Renaissance man, he is also an unparalleled event planner who uses the home to stage fundraisers for the arts. 

One could rightly add “knowledgeable eco-friendly farmer” to his resume, too. While the women chat, the large round dining table is being set for a dinner party that will feature food grown in the garden right behind the house, with nothing on the menu coming from any farther than this side of the Sagamore Bridge.  

As the dinner guests eat and also walk through the home, they will see on the walls of every room, including the bathrooms, an ever-shifting array of paintings by both rising-star contemporary artists like Jesse Ceraldi and acclaimed painters past, such as Paul Cadmus. The house does double duty as a gallery, with art coming and going. In the warm weather, people gather for the showing of films on a large screen in the backyard, courtesy of a collaboration between Fulk and the Provincetown Film Society.

Lucky Boarders

Writers, painters, filmmakers, and artists of every other stripe stay in the home’s eight bedrooms courtesy of Fulk and his husband, Kurt Wootton. Those who want to help in the effort to give artists a leg up, and thereby become patrons of the arts themselves, can make a donation to the initiative through their nonprofit organization, the Provincetown Arts Society. 

Many of those tapped to spend some time working at the house are chosen by organizations that include the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Provincetown Film Society, the Provincetown Theater (with which Strickland has collaborated for her storytelling series), and a music and speaker series called Twenty Summers. Fulk partners with all of them to bring to the fabled curlicue at the tip of the Cape an array of talented people. These individuals might not otherwise be able to take advantage of the energy given off by the Provincetown community.

The rooms for the ever-changing guest list of painters, musicians, writers, actors, and others are not just for proverbial starving artists, although they certainly number among the guests. It’s simply a matter of what arts organization reaches out with the name of someone who would benefit from having a place to stay while creating or exchanging ideas. There’s no limit to who can apply, including independent artists, historians, and others not affiliated with any particular Provincetown organization. “We wanted the house to be in service to the town, whatever that means,” Fulk says, “to open up our heads and our hearts and this house and say, ‘Come, inhabit it.’ Our aim isn’t to be another arts organization but to try to be connective tissue. Bringing people together is, I think, a powerful thing.”

One of those who came to stay was graduate student Lindsay Wentzel, who is studying maritime archaeology at North Carolina’s East Carolina University. She is writing her master’s thesis on the maritime history of Provincetown, with a particular focus on a local whaling company whose fortunes rose and then fell once petroleum was discovered and whale oil fell out of favor. It turned out that one of the owners of that company lived in the house for decades until his death in 1905, just two years before Mary Heaton Vorse purchased it.

Wentzel reached out to Fulk on Instagram to learn a little more, and the next thing she knew he was inviting her to stay at the house while she conducted some of her research at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. “It was the most surreal experience,” she says, and not just because “Ken and everyone are absolutely wonderful and made sure I was comfortable.” She explains, “I got to stay in Mary Heaton Vorse’s bedroom. That was just a really cool experience because in her book, Time in the Town, she talks about her bedroom and seeing the harbor. I would wake up and be sitting where she used to sit, having that experience for myself.”

During Wentzel’s stay, Fulk collected scans of whaling logs that had been kept in the house, made copies, and then sent them to her—an incredible boon because those logs do not exist in archives anywhere else. “I’ve been to 20 different archives around New England and haven’t seen anything like them,” she says. 

“I didn’t expect Ken and his husband to put me up because I’m not an artist or musician,” Wentzel comments. “But for them to show me that kindness and actually help with my research, it meant a lot.” 

And she did get to be part of the arts-engaged community during her visit. She recounts that during her week at the house, there was an exhibition of paintings by acclaimed Provincetown artist Salvatore Del Deo. “I was living in an art gallery,” she says. In the same week, the Provincetown Film Society had a showing of Hello Dolly in the backyard. Thesis research that couldn’t have happened any other way, world-class art, and great film came together all in one place.

The house and the Provincetown Arts Society is managed largely by Gene Tartaglia, a close friend of Fulk’s who knew him before he was Ken Fulk. When Fulk was working to get his design business off the ground in San Francisco, he spent time moonlighting as a maître d’ at Tartaglia’s restaurant to help make ends meet. 

It is Tartaglia who curates the home’s painting exhibitions, which he calls “a relatively easy process of picking what I love.” This fall, for instance, he will be showing works from Addison Art Gallery in Orleans, one of the Cape’s premier galleries. Click here for details on the exhibition’s reception events and the opportunity to watch several established Cape artists paint a live model on the grounds of the home and then put their various interpretations up for sale.

Celebrated Cape artist Paul Schulenburg will be featured as part of the Addison Art Gallery show with his sometimes Hopper-esque creations, along with other heavy hitters that include painter Sharon McGauley, sculptress Joyce Johnson (who started the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill), and painter Amy Sanders.

One of the paintings will be a Schulenburg portrait of Mary Heaton Vorse herself. Says Schulenburg, “It came up in conversations with Gene and Helen that there were no paintings of her. There are a few black-and-white photos, and even those were kind of hard to find. I found a black-and-white head shot that I used as a reference and simulated a Provincetown evening scene in the background. Provincetown is always beautiful when the sun is going down and the sky is turning, so I created an evening light, softly glowing behind her.”

Placing the painting at twilight also allowed Schulenburg not to have to get too exact with flesh tone. “With a black-and-white photo, it can be tough to come up with the skin tones,” he says. “Nighttime, colors are more subdued—it’s a way around that. The subdued color also makes it look more vintage, more from her era.

“It’s an honor” to be exhibited in the Mary Heaton Vorse House, Schulenburg adds. “It’s amazing to me to be able to participate in something like this.”

Gallery principal Helen Addison is also excited for the exhibition and its collaborative spirit. “Gene is involved with the art to a point where he goes to studios, discusses framing choices, chooses not just the artists but the works. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s specific about how the art will be presented. It’s a bit wonderful for me, after having run shows by myself for 26 years. Working with Gene is a new and refreshing experience. I’m obviously protective of my artists, and fully trust Gene and Ken to take care of them as well.” 

Of course, enjoying an exhibition at the Mary Heaton Vorse House also means enjoying Fulk’s sensitive and exquisite restoration of the property. Under his ultra-keen eye the residence has invitingly, thoughtfully, come together with very textural hand-plastered walls, salvaged pieces of furniture from Vorse’s lifetime (including a Swedish wedding chest), repurposed wide floor boards and beadboard, a doryman’s oars transformed into part of a staircase railing, the bookcase where the whaling logs were kept before Vorse’s time, beautiful bed linens (donated to the initiative by Restoration Hardware), comfy-cozy upholstered furniture that is so easy to melt into…. 

Fulk credits local builder/artisan Nate McKean for executing the often difficult work it took to get the house back up on its feet, so to speak. One issue was that the home was sitting on rubble instead of a secure foundation and “couldn’t even be jacked up because it would have fallen apart,” Fulk says. “They had to hand-dig a foundation around it.”

McKean got it done, along with so much more that needed to happen to make the house livable and safe—and soul-restoring to anyone who enters it. Fulk cannot speak more glowingly of McKean’s work. “I’m a horrible anal-retentive nut,” he comments. “I spend my life working with my team, all I do is tell them what’s wrong. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, but we gotta fix this.’ I walked through the house when Nate was done, and I didn’t have one comment.”

Would Vorse herself have been pleased? Her granddaughter, Gael Poltrack, says, “I’m sure she would have felt Ken was the right person for the job.” In between memories of her grandmother’s ability to make what she calls “a mean clam chowder” and recounting that “she loved having kids around” and “didn’t mind the chaos of childhood coming into and out of the house,” Poltrack comments that “she would have been happy that someone was there treating the arts with such respect and treating the house with such love.” In other words, the baton was passed to the right person to take over the role of, in Poltrack’s words, “welcoming the arts and people.”

Fulk, for his part, is just happy to have had the wherewithal to take it on. “I won the lottery of life, and I’m so grateful for it,” he says. “I wake up every day, and I truly do give thanks. And I think: Be a good steward of this life you’ve been given.”  

Larry Lindner is a contributing writer for Cape Cod Life Publications.

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