A Suburban-Boston Pool House is Transformed into a Social Outdoor Retreat

The design team custom matched the exterior trim to the doors, which are Marvin’s Gunmetal Gray. “I like the dark color because it is handsome, and I think it’s a nice contrast to what is a sweet little building,” says architect Stephanie Morrison. “It feels very buttoned-up and modern.”

Interior designer Kate Coughlin opted for a tonal palette in the sitting room: “You want your eye to be moving outside to the pool, not stuck in the interior,” she says.

Most of the pool is as it was when the homeowners bought the house, but reworking the coping in granite rather than bluestone gave it a modern look.

Because it sits on the opposite end of the golf simulator, the dining room needed to counterbalance some vibrant green hues. “We felt adding the seafoam-y blue onto the ceiling gave the dining room interest without being too overbearing,” says Coughlin.

When Morrison designed the addition for the dining room, she set it back a bit from the existing footprint. “The garden starts to come closer to that side, and the homeowners like to hang out around the grill located nearby,” she explains.

Under an outdoor shower, the team laid Goshen stone, which is flecked with iron deposits and mica.

Pool House Renovation Creates an Entertaining Space

If the main house is the headline act, the pool house is usually the opening band. Not so at this property in Dedham, Massachusetts, thanks to arecent top-to-tails gut revamp by Stephanie Morrison, principal architect at Local Studio, interior designer Kate Coughlin, and Catherine Hanss Brownlee, managing director of Landscape Collaborative.

“The [original] pool house programming was really minimal, and the homeowners wanted it to be more of a social space,” recalls Morrison, noting that the team, along with Robert Lawrence Builders, added a kitchenette and dining area that seats up to fourteen…handy when your grounds are the type of paradisiacal place friends and family flock to, towels and sunscreen in hand.

“Because we installed large lift-and-slide doors with retractable screens, in the summer months, it really feels like dining on a screened-in porch.”

Garden Design and Engaging Interiors Enhance Indoor-Outdoor Living

Like the pool house, the garden had been in place for decades; the goal, Hanss Brownlee says, was “to create that transition moment from kind of a woodland garden to something that was more polished.” The team enlarged existing plant beds and planted species like astilbe, bigroot geranium, and lady’s mantle.

Inside, Coughlin—who had already worked with the family of four on the main house—leaned into designing spaces that would create a cheerful  backdrop for memory-making, including a golf simulator and the airy sitting area and dining room that both overlook the water. “I wanted to have the space be a place that everyone could enjoy,” she says. “It allows for a ton of people, and it’s casual and not at all formal.”

The designers selected cedar shingles for the exterior, a nod to the original pool house, whose shingles had gone gray over time yet remained utterly charming. “The clients were into it feeling like the little house in the woods,” Morrison says. “It’s not visible from the main house during the height of summer, when all the trees are in bloom and everything’s green. You take this little path, go through an iron gate, and then suddenly you’re in this clearing, and it’s like a magical little structure with a secret garden.”

Project Team
Architecture: Local Studio
Interior design: Kate Coughlin Interiors
Builder: Robert Lawrence Builders
Landscape design: Landscape Collaborative

Styling by Cait Gury