Not to be indelicate, but Nantucket is a town notorious for its resistance to any tampering of its elegant clapboard and shingles silhouette. All the more reason to applaud the work by the New York-based designers Roman and Williams on the handsome mid-19th-century Greek Revival building in the town centre.
The former home of a local doctor has emerged from an extraordinary, yet respectful, makeover into a 20-room hotel. Whether the reception or the panelled library, every room is dressed in a rich palette of colours and textures, layered with a palimpsest of Nantucket’s history as a whaling centre alongside Native American ceramics, Dutch doors, Caucasian rugs, flame-stich prints, and hand-painted Portuguese tiles.
The bedrooms, especially, are cosy cocoons of blues and whites, offset by timber floors, plank walled bathrooms and polished brass, and white-trimmed sash windows that look out onto a garden blooming with herbs, sea roses, dense bushes of horsetail, and wisteria.
