is a more complicated question than initially assumed. Simply responding “blue” doesn’t suffice when, for example, the rolling gray swells of a storm catastrophically strike the dunes, or when shallow pools near the seashore drop steeply off into a navy pit, or when the midday summer sun turns the crests of gentle waves into glinting white diamonds. The ocean is actually composed of thousands of hues—cold grays, sparkling whites, rich blues and greens—that give the sea a depth of color to rival that of its physical measure. This Pocasset home is a study in ocean hues.

Designer Dee Elms of Boston’s Elms Interior Design loves color. For this seaside home, it was only natural for the location to serve as inspiration for its color palette. “There’s no better way to explain all the different blues of the ocean than visually,” Elms says. “We took those variations of blue and used them throughout the home to highlight its seaside location.”

The bar between the kitchen and living room is a prime example of this inspiration in action. The wall, lined with glass tiles in various shades of blue, mimics the multicolored surface of a sea glinting in the sun. Glass shelves supported by brass fixtures add shine while ensuring the focus remains on the backsplash. The bar is Elms’ favorite feature in the home. “The bar area changed the living room so much,” she says. “We decided to keep the living room clean and white, so that pop of color on the side is beautiful. The client also likes to entertain with his collection of records and personal playlists; the bar is now the perfect place to set up a turntable and spin tunes.”

The clean, white foundation of the living room allowed Elms to incorporate pops of color while preserving an atmosphere of serenity. “We used color in targeted areas to preserve the peace and lightness of the home,” she explains. “We kept the main living space on the lighter side and used it as the inspiration for the rest of the first floor.”

To achieve this lightness, Elms made sure that the room’s largest features—two back-to-back sofas and a sleek coffee table—were neutrally colored but complemented by vibrant accents. Deep blue chairs and pillows speckled in various shades of blue invite the ocean—visible through the vast floor-to-ceiling windows—inside, while rich yellow throws and decor add a vivid flair to the room. 

The yellow accents serve the dual purpose of adding golden tones to the blue-hued living room and uniting the living space with the rest of the first floor. “The floor plan is very open, so we wanted to make sure each space was distinct, yet cohesive as a whole,” Elms explains. “We started in the living room and brought that color scheme with us as we moved into the other spaces on the ground level.” For example, the adjoining dining room has a ceiling made of golden rattan wallcovering. While perhaps an unconventional ceiling color, it perfectly complements the living room’s golden accents, creating a seamless transition between spaces. 

A truly remarkable room, the dining room’s second unconventional feature is its shape. The circular space opens onto a patio boasting unobstructed ocean views. Its floor-to-ceiling windows allow diners to enjoy the beautiful vista over a meal. For Elms, this posed a challenge when it came to lighting. “Lighting is the jewelry of a room,” she says. “It’s really important to us. In this case, we needed a fixture that wouldn’t compromise the view, but could hold its own as a design feature.” The selected piece is a three-armed fixture made of both bronze and brass. “Even though the ceiling has so much movement, the lighting gives a beautiful, soft light that suits the room’s round shape,” Elms explains. 

The lighting fixture in the den next door was selected with equally careful consideration. The frosted glass, encased in brass, exudes a diffused light that matches the room’s cozy atmosphere. As a softer, smaller living space, the den’s purpose is not so much to entertain as it is to relax in a more intimate setting. Four wooden and wicker chairs surround a cozy breakfast table in the corner, and a couch provides ample seating for guests to kick up their feet on the coffee table, which was custom-made to conceal four striped ottomans underneath. Despite these noteworthy features, the real centerpiece of the room is the fireplace. Made of beach stone with a found-object wooden mantelpiece, the fireplace is a grand nod to the home’s nautical setting, and reinforced by the blue tones in the stone which are emphasized by the room’s slate blue walls.

In the kitchen, the blue and gold palette receives unexpected, but not unwelcome, company from a tomato-red range; in fact, the entire room was designed around this feature as it held personal significance for the clients. The red stove, resembling the shade of the inimitable Nantucket Red trousers, contrasts with a deep navy island, the dark tones of which are emphasized by white and black marble on the walls and countertops. The dramatic banded hood above the stove is stainless steel with brass rivets, balancing out the rich colors below with its own golden flair. This is one of many instances throughout the home where Elms mixed metals to create texture. “Mixing metals is part of life,” she says. “The texture it adds makes everything feel more alive.” 

One of the home’s standout features is its library. The walls and bookshelves, pine dappled with dark knots, are filled with volumes; a perfect point of focus as the room serves a quiet escape. Remarkably, the ceiling rivals the walls in terms of beauty: looking up, you’ll see a hand painted design by a local artisan stretching from wall to wall. “The knotty pine has real personality,” Elms recalls. “It’s beautiful, but intense. The ceiling softens the pine in a subtle way.” For clients who work from home, the library is also an unparalleled office space.

Retaining the home’s personality was imperative in the design process. “By building off of the home’s classic foundation, we were able to combine original charm and contemporary creativity,” Elms notes. The billiard room is one such refreshing take on a classic space. “Our goal was to renew the space and make it more inviting rather than concealing its original soul,” says Elms. “We added a gray-blue linen wallcovering above the original wainscoting and some patterned drapes to pull out the blue tones in the wall. Then we added a comfortable sectional in the corner and a swivel chair that emphasizes the olive tones in the carpet.” Neon orange and pink wall art adds an unexpected but welcome flash of color to the deep blue space.

Upstairs, the soft tones in the primary bedroom create a comfortable atmosphere for sleep. In this more intimate space, Elms incorporated vibrant color in the adjoining rooms to preserve the serenity of the bedroom itself. The reading room next door, for instance, is coated in a luxuriant floral wall covering featuring the clients’ own photography. The warm colors in the covering are repeated throughout the master suite, connecting the spaces under a shared color palette.

While most rooms in the home play with multiple colors at once, the primary bathroom relies on only one to drop jaws. Sea green cabinets the color of frothy waves shine beneath white marble counters and angular white walls. Elms purposely chose to focus on green in this room. “This shade is deeper than your typical seafoam green, but when you mix that with a lot of white, it looks incredibly sharp,” she explains. 

For clients who love to host, the house offers an abundance of space to entertain. From the living room window seat that can seat 25 guests, to the back-to-back couches, there is no shortage of seating. But where are these guests to sleep? To maximize the amount of sleeping areas in the home, Elms converted once-unused spaces into additional bedrooms. The second-floor lounge serves double duty as a TV room and a guest bedroom. When guests visit, the window seat transforms into a bed with storage space below, and the couch is actually a pull-out sofa. 

The attic, too, was repurposed into additional bedrooms, though this space was more difficult to design due to its sloping ceiling and scattered windows. “There are a lot of shapes in that top floor bedroom, so I had to find a balance between embracing its uniqueness and downplaying its angularity,” Elms recalls. “I went with a patterned wallpaper to conceal the shapes a bit. It was really powerful in transforming the space.” The triangular light fixtures and round ottomans at each bed incorporate a playful medley of shapes that elevated the room from an under-utilized space into an attic sanctuary.

From green to gray, to blue, to sparkling white, this home leaves no ocean hue unexplored. With its classic foundation enhanced by masterful contemporary flair, it is truly an oceanside jewel. 

Hannah Kunze is a freelance writer for Cape Cod Life Publications.

The post A Study in Ocean Hues appeared first on Cape Cod LIFE.

Interior design team Paul White and David Nault of Boston’s Weena and Spook use white as a backdrop for their Cape-Nantucket Sound project. 

Remember back to your youth, say age 21, when you had just finished school and the world seemed to be your oyster? You were young, fearless and felt anything could happen! 

That was David Nault and Paul White; newly-minted Fashion Institute of Technology (New York) grads standing in the street at 660 Madison Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side looking up at Barneys’ flagship store. 

With a rolling rack full of their newly-designed fashion collection samples funded by a couple of investors, and David’s sister as their fit model standing by their side, the team walked through the door. 

Their meeting went well, and although their fashion was a perfect fit for Barneys’ high-end fashion fourth floor, they were new to the game and as unproven designers, were asked to return with a more modest sportswear line that Barneys could showcase on the second floor. 

David and Paul did just that, hoping that someday it would lead to a ride up the escalator with their rolling racks all the way to the glittering fourth floor high fashion realm. 

Then came the stock market crash of 1987 and all the duo’s investors left.  

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise when David and Paul realized that it was much more fun and less stressful to sell directly to the customers through trunk shows. They quickly sold out their collection.

Their next gig was creating a private label for a store on Martha’s Vineyard and the pair moved to the island. 

The store didn’t last long but their stay on the Vineyard did. At a loss for their next chapter, they decided to put a small ad in The Vineyard Gazette for their fashion design services. At $25 for 25 words, they had two words left so they added the words “also slipcovers” on a lark.

Armed with some serious fashion sewing skills on an island without a fashion scene, they decided that if you can fit a woman you can certainly fit a chair so how hard could it be to make custom slipcovers? 

The phone rang off the hook and soon the pair were arm-deep into chaises and couches for the well-heeled island set. Their company, with the light-hearted name of Weena and Spook, was born.

Twenty-five years later, David and Paul are wildly successful with a cadre of very loyal clients on the Cape and Islands. 

They cultivate unusually long and close relationships with many of their clients. Often they get to know the young homeowners first when they have one child with one on the way and stay with them as the families grow to five children and a bursting household. 

As life would grow more hectic and colorful for the families they work with, they would ask David and Paul to design them a calm home atmosphere to balance their crazy lives. “Designing someone’s home is a very intimate business,” says David. “You are asking them how many handbags they own or how many shoes to get an idea of how to design their closet systems.” Their clients also appreciate that the pair are a couple in real life as well, so as David and Paul joke, “all the fighting gets out of the way and they have agreed on all the major design decisions before even pulling up to the house.” 

Working with the same families for so many years, David and Paul are often asked to pick out and order the everyday items in the home as well—stocking the cabinets with servingware, choosing bedding and even picking out kitchen appliances. Weena and Spook love to take on these extra services because they help to complete the atmosphere they have created for their clients’ homes. 

“Our design approach is to make homes look like the homeowner had the know-how and the time to do it themselves,” David explains. 

Paul has a very structural mind which allows Weena and Spook to not only design all interiors, doors, cabinets and built-ins, but also to custom design 80% of the furniture for the homes as well. They contract talented woodworkers they adore, and upholsterers they adore, so their team can do it all. 

Cape-Nantucket Sound was a project in which the homeowner wanted a quiet, serene palette. 

Paul imagined how beach grass looks in winter and created a matching palette for the home.

The homeowners had small kids so Paul designed the dining room with curved doors that could shut out the noise of a loud, happy dinner party from the kids asleep upstairs. “It looks kind of like a jewel box when it is closed and sets the dining room apart from the rest of the home,” he remarks. 

Much of the house has a baseline canvas of white. “Think of a room like a blank canvas, like an art gallery first, then you add pops of colors and textures,” says Paul. “Colors are added inside that reflect what you would see outside in the summer. This palette also keeps the home feeling warm in the winter when the leaves are off the trees.” The mostly white rooms have accents of the blues of the ocean, the greens of the grasses, and the browns of the trees.

Most of the rooms host all white furniture, which might make guests pause when asking for the red wine at a cocktail party. 

But Weena and Spook have a secret weapon because all of that pristine white is made from indoor-outdoor materials. 

This gives the furniture both beauty and practicality. There is no fading from the sun through the large windows and spills are easily wiped up. “Everyone has messy lives and this material is all we use now because we want everyone to be comfortable and relaxed in their homes, no matter what happens,” David says. 

This magical material is called solution-dyed acrylics. The company Perennials has an outstanding collection of fabrics and carpets that are all resistant to spills and fading.  

The pair also source from MariaFlora Fabrics, an Italian firm that creates fabrics that can look and feel like linen, chenille and velvet. 

“This is the new wave. Clients say ‘Don’t show me anything that can’t get messy,’” says David. 

“Ten years ago, only 20% of the fabrics used were messy-friendly, now the marketplace is full of this type of fabric,” David says. 

The one room to which they added a myriad of color was the family room. Because this space was going to have games and toys in them anyway, the team wanted to anchor the room with bright colors so the clutter wouldn’t stand out. 

On the shelves, the pair added a large collection of yellow-covered National Geographic magazines hoping to encourage the kids to pick up something to read that was not a tablet or phone. David fondly remembers reading the iconic National Geographic magazines as a child during visits to his grandmother and expanding his world through their stories.

The collection of red books on the bookshelves are all real books, purchased from a set design company touting “books by the foot.” “We checked out each book before putting it on the shelves to make sure they were diverse and family-friendly material,” reassured David. 

Even the coffee table books were chosen specifically for their color and size to fit the room’s design. At the end of a project, the team often gifts the homeowners with coffee table books, and the clients are repeatedly surprised that David and Paul have chosen just the book that they would like.

David and Paul are not surprised at all. During the design and installation process, they develop a trusting and close relationship with the families and they put much thought into exactly the type of book to suit their client’s tastes. They don’t gift novels because the homeowners may not have the time to sit down and read a book, but anyone can pick up a coffee table book and flip through it while having their morning coffee, David reasons. 

In the end, homeowners get exactly the home they love. Many of their clients think their home is so beautiful that they don’t want to change a thing, and even take detailed photos of each room so things can be put back exactly where they were after a party. 

When asked if they still do any fashion design, Paul remembers being asked by a client to design a mother-of-the-bride dress for her. “Because I knew her so well from working with her for many years, I was able to design a bespoke outfit that perfectly fit her style and personality and she loved it.” 

So the pair have come full circle in their design journey. They can do it all and their clients love them for it. Sometimes dreams really do come true, and from their abode in Yarmouth Port, the world really does seem to be their oyster.  

Valerie Gates is a freelance writer for Cape Cod Life Publications.

To read the story behind this company’s unique name, Weena and Spook, visit stg-capecodlifecom-staging.kinsta.cloud.

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