By Michaela Cavallaro
Photos by Erin Little
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East
Kitchen
Last year, serial renovators Christina Salway and John Moskowitz fell for their latest project: a sagging circa 1800s Sedgwick farmhouse whose owners had run out of rehabbing mojo. The couple, New Yorkers who had previously restored homes in Stonington and Brooksville, shored up the foundation, then set to work uncovering the cottage’s original finishes. They pulled down generations of wallpaper, revived peeling tin ceilings, and, in the kitchen (above), exposed hand-hewn beams and pine flooring. Salway, an interior designer, chose Farrow & Ball’s Inchyra Blue for the existing lower cabinets, now sporting a Carrara-marble countertop, and Vert de Terre for the woodwork, including a fireplace surround that anchors an AGA stove. Checkerboard Zellige-tile backsplashes distill the woodsy palette, while, off-center above the range, a single ochre square winks at any pretense of perfection.
Living Room
Salway applied a “cockamamie” mixture of joint compound, plaster of paris, and Farrow & Ball’s All White paint to the dinged-up walls throughout the home, approximating the Old World, textured look she’d admired in a Cornwall farmhouse her sister once lived in. Vert De Terre on woodwork provides another throughline. Loathe to cover too much of the original wide-pine floor — “because it’s largely a summer cottage, you want the cool feeling of wood underfoot,” Salway says — she pulled in a small yard-sale Oriental rug. It complements an antique Swedish settee she loves for its carved-wood detailing (though her family complains about its lack of comfort) and antique wingback chairs reupholstered in a Guy Goodfellow floral print that echoes the shades in a pair of Penobscot Bay maps.
Owners’ Suite
Converting the attic into a primary suite involved laying a plywood subfloor beneath the existing pine planks, drywalling, re-glazing the windows, and puzzling out where to put a bath. The solution: installing an antique copper tub in the bedroom and squeezing a half-bath — with walls in Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster conjuring the inside of a seashell — under the eaves. Salway found the Carrara-marble countertop behind the property’s barn and had Orland’s Freshwater Stone restore it, and Moskowitz turned a $40 antique Swedish cabinet into a vanity. “So many wonderful things already exist,” Salway says. “If you can give them new life, they have built-in authenticity, patina, and charm.”
Check out the whole-house renovation on Magnolia Network’s In With the Old on August 30.
