When Jaci Conry was growing up on Cape Cod, her childhood was filled with days on the water, both on boats and from the shore. “I grew up going to the beach with my family, sailed in the summers, learned to drive in the beach parking lot, and spent so many moments there with friends as a teenager,” she says. “[The beach] was just always there—something to be counted on in the landscape of my life.”
Now a Boston-based author and design journalist who lives in Back Bay with her husband, children, and goldendoodle, Conry returns to their second home in Falmouth any chance she can get for that sense of salty, sandy ease. Upon stepping inside, she feels what she calls “the shift.” It’s the “unspooling of whatever I was carrying,” she writes in her new book, The Summer House. “The list in my head quiets; my breath slows.”
“The shift” is what Conry endeavors to capture in the book, which showcases a dozen breezy, casually beautiful summer homes across the Northeast—from a time-honored Cape on Maine’s coast to a bucolic post-and-beam Colonial in Connecticut.
Having a seasonal respite feels more important than ever, Conry points out. “It’s really impossible to totally unplug these days. The beauty and the curse of technology is that you can bring it with you—you can bring your work anywhere, you can always be plugged in,” she says. “A summer house can represent this place where you go to be slower.”
Conry’s book rounds up a variety of design styles while underscoring the simplicity of summer’s loose, unstructured days. There are quaint and cozy rustic getaways, historic houses overflowing with antiques, polished newer-construction homes, and more minimal, modern-inspired abodes. “There are so many different ways that people live in summer houses,” Conry says. “We really tried to get at the stories behind the houses, the history of the houses, and why people live in them the way that they do.”…