There are three things oil painter Denise Delaney wants you to know about her home in Annisquam: It was originally a boat-building shed, it’s been an artist studio for almost a century, and The Sound of Music may have been written there.
“Northern Cape Ann was a big granite quarrying area,” Delaney says, noting that the industry boomed from the 1820s to the 1930s. “The granite was brought into Lobster Cove, where it was put on schooners and shipped out to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The granite from those quarries was used for the Boston and Baltimore post offices, the Longfellow Bridge in Cambridge, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, and over five million pavers for the streets of Boston.”
Her home, perched along the cove, sits above a small granite dock, many of which line the cove and were used for boats to pick up granite slabs for shipping down the east coast.
Since moving to Annisquam two years ago, Delaney has celebrated the home’s rich history. One of the homeowners in the 1920s and ’30s used the plot’s guesthouse as an art studio, a tradition Delaney honors to this day.
“Annisquam is a very unique place—it’s stunningly beautiful,” says John Harden, architect at OLSON LEWIS. “It’s a very small community with lots of unique homes around this little body of water that forms the peninsula.”
The history that made the home so charming also meant that it required some significant renovation.
“If you went into this house for the first time and walked into the one big room, which was essentially the ship-building barn, it’s a vaulted space with a huge window that looks over Lobster Cove,” says Harden. “It was a perfect place for an artist to be inspired. The views were there already, but the window really wasn’t sufficient.
“The house was a bit of a rabbit’s warren,” he adds. “It had been added onto in pieces again and again. There were lots of small spaces that didn’t work together as a whole.”
Working with Loren Coons of Coons Construction, the team found opportunities to brighten the home—removing a loft and opening up rooms that trapped valuable light.
“This project was the perfect union of a client, a site, and a house,” says Harden. “If I were an artist, this is where I’d want to be, and she was the right person because she could see the vision for it. She was going to be able to make the most of this property and transform it.”
An Ohio native, Delaney first discovered the North Shore when she was preparing for the ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton. Her career took her through several evolutions, including banking in New York and Boston and then relocating to the mountains of Colorado where she painted.
“I would always come to Annisquam in the summer for painting and vacation,” Delaney says.
Since the renovation, her studio features sumptuous picture windows, and a balcony outside the primary suite is easel-ready. Just as Delaney transformed the home, working in Annisquam has changed her artistic oeuvre, too.
“I’m shifting from Colorado mountain landscapes to seascapes, painting boats and the ocean,” Delaney says. “It’s very inspiring, but it’s requiring a shift in my skills and learning to create new venues that I haven’t focused on in the past.”
“While the light shifts, the mountains are static,” she adds. “They’re always there. Out painting by the seashore, it feels much more dynamic. The waves are coming in, the birds are flying, and the wind is blowing in a way that you get the salt air in your face. The dynamism of the ocean is very compelling.”
As for The Sound of Music? In the 1940s, Russell Crouse, a New York-based playwright, spent his summers in Lobster Cove at a home across the street. His writing partner, Howard Lindsay, would visit Crouse during the summer and stay in Delaney’s home, which at the time was a guesthouse for the neighbors. “He was here in the summer of 1949 when they were writing the story based on Maria von Trapp and the Trapp Family Singers, which became The Sound of Music.”