Editor’s Miscellany: Revisiting Blue and White
June 23, 2011
By Kyle Hoepner
My editor’s letter in our July/August 2010 issue elicited more comment than any other I’ve written so far. In it, I had the temerity to express a certain…impatience…with the automatic use of blue and white as a seaside color palette. Worse, I owned up to a certain irritation with the 1,001 versions of the house from Something’s Gotta Give that have sprung up coast to coast. Did I really dare question such beloved orthodoxy?
Consider, though, another sentence from that same letter. “Now don’t get me wrong: blue and white can be done incredibly beautifully, and I myself have admired many blue-and-white rooms over the years.†My objection wasn’t to blue and white per se; it was just to the unthinking and unimaginative way in which it is often executed.
Well, this year New England Home is publishing two houses that do blue and white with a notably different spin. The first appeared recently in our May/June 2011 issue. In this house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, architect Michael T. Gray of Carpenter & MacNeille and interior designer John De Bastiani combined classic elements with assertive, globally inspired patterns, to fresh effect.
![NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-04](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-04.jpg)
![NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-05](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-05.jpg)
![NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-07](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-07.jpg)
![NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-10](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-MJ11-Debastiani-10.jpg)
This lakeside house in western Connecticut is just about to appear in the Summer 2011 issue of New England Home’s Connecticut. Architect Robert Dean and interior designer Anne Miller created a somewhat chalet-like dwelling that invests blue and white with notable sheen and elegance, while still keeping things quirky and light.
![NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-01](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-01.jpg)
From the Summer 2011 issue of New England Home’s Connecticut. Photos by Michael Partenio; a clickable link to the story will be added as soon as it’s available.
![NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-06](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-06.jpg)
![NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-07](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-07.jpg)
![NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-11](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-11.jpg)
![NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-08](https://www.nehomemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NEH-CT-SUM11-Dean-08.jpg)
Do you have any interestingly non-typical examples of blue and white design you’d like to share?
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