After years of working for a global fashion company that brought Jess Weeth everywhere from Saint Tropez to South Korea, she settled down in her charming hometown of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she shifted her creative gears to residential interiors. The designer opened her studio, Weeth Home, on the main street she grew up with less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean and was soon working with a couple on their primary residence in town when they came across a stunning waterfront property on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
The 18th-century estate was seated on 40 acres along a secluded tributary of Chesapeake Bay that still housed an original Georgian Colonial structure. And if those details weren’t enough to have Weeth jumping at the prospect of getting to redesign the 10,000-square-foot estate, the couple had hired renowned architect Charles Goebel to thoughtfully bring the property’s various buildings that had been built over a span of 250 years into the modern age while still paying homage to its deeply rooted history.
“This property was love at first sight, but it needed so much love outside and in,” Weeth says. “Every single wall was touched, though the whole goal was to make it feel that it was new and hadn’t been decorated in one fell swoop.”
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By the time Weeth arrived on the scene, Goebel had already been hard at work, delving into the architectural history of the house, outbuildings and the property itself. The spaces had been neglected for years, and Goebel had to determine how to thoughtfully adapt them to the family’s lifestyle and vision of their future. The wife dreamed of spending holidays, sharing the space with friends and family over the summers, and even hosting weddings for her children here, so it was important to create a place that felt deeply rooted in its environment and in the clients themselves.
“We focused on honoring the quality of the original home, making the most of what was there, and then reworked awkward, ill-considered additions that had accreted to the historic house over its 250-year existence,” Goebel says. “Our goal was to edit and clarify the architecture so that the entire house and its additions were recrafted to a coherent whole. The interiors are brighter and more open, and there’s a proper flow and organization to the plans.”
Some of the most notable architectural changes made to the main house include opening up the entry hall where a striking spiral staircase now sits for a grander welcome and creating higher ceilings to make the rooms feel more generous and dramatic.
Weeth joined the project with a stunning, light-drenched canvas to work with and says the home had such a sense of place to it that coming up with the design was never about playing into a certain color scheme or style, but about capturing a generational feel that wouldn’t compete with the estate’s idyllic setting.
“When I first presented the design boards to our clients, they weren’t world’s apart, but I was definitely sharing what I thought were two different visions,” says Weeth. “The first was all about ‘the traveled collector’ where we could juxtapose sculptural with more rustic, primitive pieces together while the other was more of a modern take on a European countryside estate. There were parts of both that the client fell in love with, so we ended up leaning into rustic European charm while finding moments where we could play up the sculptural and simple.”
The whole house is a balance of romance and restraint, which one will notice upon arrival after winding through an idyllic tree-lined drive. The grand entry hall that Goebel’s team created now features a striking spiral staircase with an iron railing that juxtaposes against the plaster walls and an Urban Electric chandelier in a verdigris finish that invites visitors to relax and settle in while relishing in the grandeur of this historic property.
Throughout the house lies landscape murals, tapestry-inspired textiles, and textural materials that lend the house to feeling as if it’s existed in this same way since the 1700s while boasting all of the modern comforts of home one would expect from such a luxurious estate today.
“We really played into that layered, collected feel throughout the house but always brought things down with an approachable rusticity that marries well to the setting of the Eastern Shore that has this almost wild, untamed feel to the outside,” Weeth says.
Both the common areas and the private bedrooms are warm and welcoming, offering exquisite property or water views whenever possible. However, Weeth is partial to the home’s main living room and the third-floor bedroom that really capture her creative vision for this home. The living room is enveloped in a Susan Harter landscape mural wallpaper and overlooks the reflecting pool to really set the scene of the outside setting guiding the interior design.
The third floor bedroom belongs to one of the children, and Weeth says it’s one of the best rooms in the house. It strikes a delicious balance of coziness and drama, thanks to the vaulted ceilings and beautiful Palladian windows that are balanced with sweeter details like the window seat bench, built-in dressers and an extra twin bed for sleepovers.
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Both Weeth and Goebel agree that this project was so successful in part to the clients’ trust and willingness to be part of such a massive undertaking. Weeth says that her favorite aspect of the property is that the home feels so much like the family and that it enhances, rather than competes with, the beauty of the setting. Goebel says he is most proud of being part of a design team that could breathe new life into this historic home and property, not as a museum piece, but rather as a “gracious and comfortable home for a young, active family and friends.”
Though there is this sense of scale, history, and grandeur woven throughout the property, the house really does invite its inhabitants to embrace indoor-outdoor living at its finest—and not just in the form of lavish cocktail parties. This property is also well-equipped for kids in swimsuits running from pool to kitchen and back again for popsicles, lazy mornings with cups of coffee in pajamas, and family game nights around the dinner table—all of which are accompanied by unbeatable views of the water and landscape that drew in the property’s original inhabitants to call this place home so long ago.
Lauren Wicks is a Birmingham-based writer covering design trends, must-have products, travel inspiration, and entertaining. She’s obsessed with globally inspired textiles, hosting dinner parties, and French cocktails.
