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Moving to Charleston, South Carolina, nine years ago was a leap for a native New Yorker like me. It wasn’t totally foreign territory; I’d been seduced by the Low Country as a young girl. This landscape of marsh, pluff mud, and palmettos is where I spent childhood Thanksgivings with my grandparents. Avid duck hunters, they built a retreat in the 1960s in the ACE Basin, a magical expanse of pristine estuaries and old rice fields just 30 miles south of Charleston. It’s a sacred spot where our family still gathers, but to a girl who grew up in a Manhattan brownstone, it felt like entering another realm, wild and tropical, with alligators everywhere.
My grandparents and parents were dedicated conservationists, and their love of the land, of birds and wildlife, is my proud inheritance. I’m also a city girl who planned on a high-powered legal career, but I’ve learned that life zigs and zags, and your soul can have a different plan than your ego once did. For me those zigzags included starting my own family during my third year of law school, in the wake of my father’s death.
My priorities shifted, and I left law first for motherhood and then to pursue an enduring passion for design—another inheritance, perhaps mostly from my philosopher father, who collected antiquities, Indigenous art, and duck decoys with which he’d create tableaus throughout our homes. In a further zag, my then-husband and I moved with our two young children to Charleston on something of a lark. As a history major and lover of old buildings, I was quickly taken by the city’s beauty and architecture and fell hard for this circa-1740 house.
I loved that the home’s historic fabric was largely intact—including an original facade that survived the 1861 fire that destroyed much of Charleston—and the fact that the interiors hadn’t been updated since the 1970s, giving me great raw material for making my own imprint. With original cypress paneling in the main rooms, a traditional Charleston piazza, lots of natural light, and a deep lot, it’s a dreamy canvas for playing with lively colors and mixing antiques with family heirlooms and more modern pieces…