A Four Season Porch is Enjoyed Year Round

An Urban Electric Co. chandelier supplies modernity while floors hand-painted by Chris Pearson ground the porch. The copper floor lamp and ceramic stool are from The Future Perfect; the console table is Andrianna Shamaris.

A coterie of seating from Kettal, including the sofa and chairs as well as the side and coffee tables, creates a spot for highbrow conversation and tucking into beach reads alike. Throw pillows in Christopher Farr Cloth and Pierre Frey were made by La Regence.

“I love the circle window,” says interior designer Phillip Thomas of the existing architectural element. “It’s totally different, totally unexpected, and takes it from being a utilitarian device to something that has some artistic value to it.”

Lunch served at a Holly Hunt table features views of Arizona Needle, artist Tom Faulkner’s garden sculpture.

Urban Electric Co. flush-mount lights don’t distract from the sky-blue ceiling. The painted ‘carpet’ on the floor features a glazing that gives the colors a woven look. The high-gloss final finish helps bounce light around the space.

Four Season Waterfront Porch Design

The trouble with waterfront porches is that, much like a convertible, they’re often best admired in theory. This one, perched along a sound in coastal Connecticut, came with beautiful views…plus wind, bugs, and all the predictable indignities of the outdoors. Designer Phillip Thomas’s solution wasn’t just to enclose it but to transform it into a four-season retreat that feels
connected to both the house and the landscape beyond.

“It was a space that, as much as they loved it, was rarely used,” recalls Thomas, who envisioned a nook tricked out not merely for perfect July mornings but for chilly November evenings. Thanks to radiant heat, weather-hardy materials, and a healthy disregard for conventional categories, now “it can be used in the dead of winter as well as in the heat of summer.”

The project is part of a broader shift that Thomas has noticed in residential design. “We’ve spent so many years bringing the outdoors into our interiors,” Thomas says, “and I feel like now we’re bringing our interiors to our outdoors.”

Weather Resistant Materials for Outdoor Living

The result is a living area that enjoys plenty of fresh sea air. And so that it all lasts, every choice was made with weather in mind, either “resistant to the elements or so it would only get more beautiful coming into contact with the elements.” Webbed seating nods to the nautical. A teak root table will develop a silvery patina over time. In the humidity, the scalloped copper floor lamp will darken and eventually turn verdigris. “All of these pieces are living pieces,” Thomas says.

Perhaps his cleverest move appears underfoot. Rather than wrestling with outdoor rugs that shift and buckle—“carpets can twist and turn as they move with hot and cold,” Thomas points out—they designed ‘carpets’ and had them painted directly onto the wood floors by decorative artist Chris Pearson.

Timeless Coastal Design Details

Above it all, a sky-blue outdoor plaster ceiling references traditional porch ceilings once believed to deter insects. Here, however, the nostalgia comes packaged with durability: the outdoor plaster can “get wet without falling apart,” Thomas notes, while lending the area a dreamy, cloudless, open-sky quality—be it June or January.

Project Team
Architecture: William Leavy Architecture
Interior design: Phillip Thomas Inc.
Builder: Coady Construction