By Marimar McNaughton • Photography by Joshua Curry Staying the Main Twelve feet from the water, How a 1980s houseboat slipped into the tree canopy. the gentle wake of passing boats sends dappled light onto the ceiling in the first-level living room. That it feels like the room is rocking as the water laps beneath its foundation is an illusion made more believable by the fact that the core of this completely overhauled, com-pact three-story dwelling is a houseboat. Overlooking Myrtle Grove Sound is the float-able home constructed in the haul out area of Masonboro Boat Yard by Ed and Jonelle Lowe in 1981. Christened Mainstay, the houseboat was intended to be the Lowes’ retirement home. At only 14 feet wide, its size was configured by what could legally be trucked over land. Mid-plan, Ed Lowe had a knee replacement. When spring rolled around, the Mainstay was still sitting in the middle of the boatyard’s haul out area. The night before a 100-ton crane arrived to move it, the Lowes said they ran around, tape measures in hand, try-ing to figure out where to relocate their dreamboat. “We would stand ladders up around the live oaks to see what our view would be, and if it would fit between the trees; and lo and behold, there she sits,” Jonelle Lowe wrote. In an email to Mike Stonestreet, who bought the boatyard at the mouth of Whiskey Creek and the foot of Trails End Road, from the Lowes in 2004, Jonelle Lowe wrote the name Mainstay came from Rockland, Maine, where the boat was to be shipped, then set upon a barge at Knight’s Marine. The Lowes thought they would eventually retire there after spending about 20 summers in the Penobscot area, once they discovered cool August weather. Stonestreet acquired the treed boat-house in the real estate transaction. The structure cobbled together from the boatyard’s aging office building 44 WBM october 2014 resembled what Stonestreet, tongue in cheek, describes as a vertical trailer park with a doublewide base, a singlewide center, topped by a camper. Stonestreet and his partner Maura Hart liked the idea of recycling the idio-syncratic house, which enjoyed grandfa-thered waterfront privileges. Significantly altering the footprint or tearing it down would have forced the couple to comply with new building codes increasing the freeboard eight feet higher and moving the entire structure 75 feet farther from the waterfront behind the existing live oak tree line. Before the renovation, which began in November 2013 and concluded in August 2014, each level had been entered from a 200-foot ramp. To unify the exterior, board and bat-ten siding envelopes the ground level and shingles cover the upper story exteriors. A primary stair carries residents and guests to an open deck and the home’s main entry on the north. Architectural designer John Croom, of Cornerstone Residential Designs, added an interior stair tower on the south eleva-tion and redesigned the interior flow of the home. “It was so chopped up. It was an ingenious redesign of the space,” says interior designer Jennifer Kraner of Big Sky Design. Kraner led Stonestreet and Hart in the selection of the home’s finishes to sup-port the treehouse/boathouse dichotomy. “Half the people call it the treehouse, the other half call it the boathouse,” Stonestreet says. The living room floats in the space once reserved for hanging out, was equipped with a pingpong table and kitchenette. A mélange of seacoast Nantucket and Low Country elements were blended to mint a fresh look for the former boathouse. Opposite, the south elevation tower is reminiscent of turn-of-the- century lifesaving stations.
October 2014
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