ELLE DECOR
This Martha’s Vineyard Home was built to tell a story…
Interior design firm Carrier and Company joined a new-build project in the “empty field” stage, but, from the start, the clients had a very specific vision for their dream home.
It’s not exactly a trade secret that building a house from the ground up requires years of advance planning. So when Jesse Carrier and Mara Miller, the married founders of interior design firm Carrier and Company, began working on a Martha’s Vineyard house that was still in the “empty field” stage, they put in an order for a custom L’Atelier Parisstove. Each range is bespoke, custom built to the owner’s specifications, and can take years to complete. Since the stove they ordered was sizable, the kitchen would have to be assembled around it.
Then the pandemic hit, slowing down the already lengthy building process. The stove arrived several years after it had been ordered, but the house was still years from completion. “It became this joke for all of us,” says Carrier. “Thank god we got that stove ordered!”
Throughout the building process, Carrier and Miller adapted to what they call “island time.” In addition to the pandemic delays, the house was a labor of love for all involved, and as such could not be rushed. The homeowners, a couple with two children who, at the time, were based in New York City, bought the lot in 2017. They already owned a cottage on the Vineyard but had always dreamed of building a home. The husband has a degree in architecture and spent several years just sketching ideas. “He knew the property so well,” says Miller. “He’d been walking the site and walking the site and walking the site. He already knew where he was going to have coffee every morning.”
Eventually the couple hired an architect (James Moffatt of Vineyard-based Greenwater Architects) to help translate drawings into actionable plans, and landscape architects (Reed Hilderbrand, a prominent Cambridge, Massachusetts–based firm) to site the house so it could take full advantage of the views of an expansive meadow, a pond, and the ocean beyond. In addition to the main house, which has four bedrooms, the plans also called for a pool and poolhouse, and an outdoor dining and lounging pavilion with its own kitchen.
Carrier and Miller came on board before any construction began. “We wanted everyone involved early because we always wanted the landscape and building materials to be part of the interiors,” says the wife. “Rather than thinking about [Carrier and Company] as interior designers, they were simply another important part of the overall design team.”
From the beginning, the plans for the house were driven by a narrative. The homeowner imagined the house as an older structure—perhaps a wood and stone barn—and a newer, more modern wing that had hypothetically been added on later. The living room, kitchen, dining room, and a family games area would all be in the “old” part of the house, while the new wing would hold bedrooms. “It was this concept of melding old and new,” says Carrier. “It was important that parts of the house feel like they had always been on the island.”
This storytelling provided a vision for the home. The team chose different flooring for the two parts of the house, for example, and added subtle variations in things like cabinetry, wall finishes, tile, and hardware. “The homeowners were just so clear about the choices they made,” says Moffat, the architect. “You’d ask, ‘what kind of plaster should we use here?’ And the answer would be ‘that's got to be the tinted plaster because it's the old world part of the house, and then we'll transition to the painted plaster in the other areas.’”
This approach suited Carrier and Miller just fine. After all, the first line of their 2023 monograph, Defining Chic, is “Being a designer is a bit like being a Method actor inhabiting a role.” Though Carrier and Co.’s interiors all share a serene, unfussy quality that has made them a favorite of clients like Anna Wintour, Jessica Chastain, and Annie Leibovitz, their working style is project and client specific.
“They really took the time to understand how our family lives and uses our spaces,” says the wife. She points to the way the duo configured the oversized living room. “We love entertaining and hosting,” she says. “They spent a lot of time helping us design a room that can comfortably accommodate many guests but still feel warm and intimate when it’s just a small group.”
The one request that gave nearly everyone on the design team pause was for a subterranean dining room. The homeowners had visions of hosting extended family for Thanksgiving and in the colder months, when their open-air dining pavilion would be too exposed. They wanted to emulate a mountain house they had once visited in France which had a cellar-like dining room, lit only by candles. In the narrative of the house, this room was part of the “old” structure—its cellar. A mason clad the space in stone and, after several tries, Carrier and Miller found an antique refectory table that fit perfectly. A dumbwaiter was added to the kitchen above to make transporting food easier. They managed to talk the homeowners into adding a few sconces and lamps—“at first he wanted to have no electricity at all, but we convinced him he needed lights, at least for cleanup,” says Carrier.
The designers ultimately came around to the vision. “It’s sort of Vegas, but in a good way,” says Carrier. “You just lose track of time. Dinners can go on forever, and I think that was the intention.”
