Larry Lindner
Newport Home magazine
When a couple decided to buy a summer home for themselves and their three young children, the wife assumed they would purchase something in a resort town on the coast of Maine. So she wasn’t prepared when her husband showed her a photograph of a faded shingle-style house in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
“It looked very bleak,” she says. “You just saw the rocks jutting up near the shoreline. It seemed like a more forbidding environment than I imagined for a beach house.” But when they finally visited the house in person one gray November day, “I fell in love with it instantly,” she says. “Something about it struck me. It felt like such a well-loved house. You could just feel the happy memories there.” Indeed, the family selling the turn-of-the-last-century home had been going there since 1940, and the last resident grew up building forts on the property and eventually marrying there.