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.
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Fred Albert
Newport Home magazine
A few years ago, Jill and Barry Martin went shopping for a house in Newport so they could indulge Barry’s passion for sailing. Although the couple loved old houses, they weren’t looking to tackle a makeover so much as a makeunder Jill’s term for a light, cosmetic touch-up where you slap on a new coat of paint and call it a day.
The house they ended up buying was not one of those.
The Queen Anne–style residence in Newport’s Kay-Catherine neighborhood had been remodeled several times over the past 130+ years, and spent much of its life as a two-family home (with the narrow, closed-off staircase to show for it). By the time the Martins found the place in 2019, much of the history had been stripped away, and years of renters had left their mark.