If it is possible to divide the world of home buyers into people who cannot look beyond terrible carpet and those who take a deep breath and forge ahead, Jess Grane falls into the second category.
“It was greenish,” Ms. Grane said, her voice tinged with horror, referring to the patterned floor covering she found in a midcentury oceanfront co-op in the Hamptons hamlet of East Quogue, N.Y. “How on earth do you put carpet in a beach house?”
Other buyers who managed to get past the carpet might have been put off by the unit’s size — only 550 square feet. But for Ms. Grane, a New York City transplant from Barcelona, who is married to a fellow Spaniard and has two children, small was no deterrent. A vice president of marketing for Activia, a yogurt brand owned by Danone, she said she prefers modest beach houses like the cottages in her native Catalonia to the many hulking estates on Long Island’s East End.
The home where the carpet moldered was neither a cottage nor a maritime pleasure palace, but an apartment in a 1965 development, Round Dune, with four two-story circular buildings. The glass-walled structures sit on a sliver between Shinnecock Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, presenting watery views from their combined 76 units. Ms. Grane recalled first seeing “these little apartments all facing the ocean” each with a wide terrace. It was “a hidden gem among grand mansions,” she said.
In 2022, she and her husband, Ben Boix, a vice-president for customer relationship management at the eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, paid $415,000 for an upper-level co-op and began renovations that March. They completed the renovations in just eight weeks. And one of the first things to go was the offensive carpet.
The couple also tore out the unit’s single bedroom, to reduce obstructions to their view of the surrounding sea, sky and greenery. “Even when a space is small, when you have a glass wall everything looks enormous,” Ms. Grane said. They took advantage of the nearly 10-foot ceiling height to turn a windowed walk-in closet into a bunk room for their 14-year-old son, Adrian, and 8-year-old daughter, Emma, and to stack an adult loft bed above that, with storage inserted between the two sleeping areas. The bed is reached by a ladder in the living room.
An urge for simplicity dictated the interior palette of stark white and cream, with royal blue accents. The neutrals were inspired by Mediterranean beach houses, which reflect the white-hot brilliance of perpetual sun. Ms. Grane noted that blue is a Hamptons color that she frequently sees in striped fabrics.
Newly paneled, white-painted walls match the ceiling. Replacement floorboards were laid down, and the only rugs added were sisal.
Simplicity also governed the conversion of the 1960s kitchen into a space whose centerpiece is an island where Ms. Grane regularly makes paella. This feature is topped in a matte, sand-colored Cosentino surface material from Spain, which she said she preferred to bright, shiny marble; above it hang woven sea grass lamps from Morocco.
“Even our paella pans are beige,” she said. “Because everything, absolutely everything, had to speak the same language: calm.”
A cluttered wall of cabinetry was swapped out for open shelves custom ordered from Etsy. The rest of the kitchen was mostly sourced from Home Depot.
In short, nothing is precious here, except for maybe the kitchen exhaust system, a premium buy that Ms. Grane felt was necessary because of the small quarters and her love of cooking. “We didn’t want to spend a lot,” she said. “You are close to the beach; it is humid.”
Beach erosion is also a factor in her low-key attitude. In 2020, after 50 feet of beachfront had been wiped away by nor’easters in a single year, Round Dune initiated an emergency project to replace some dunes with Geocubes, sand-filled containers that keep erosion at bay. But no one knows what kind of devastation the next big storm will bring. The fleeting enjoyment of summer weekends has a whole new level of precarity.
The family, who live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pay regular visits from mid-May to October, when Round Dune closes for the season. Ms Grane blocks out at least two weeks in July for mother-daughter beach time with Emma while Adrian pursues summer activities in town.
With its sun-bleached vibe and single closet crammed with bathing suits and gear, the little unit serves activities that lie beyond its glass walls: splashing in the surf, swimming in the complex’s pool, playing tennis. The terrace, where the family takes most of its meals, is large enough for entertaining as many as a dozen paella eaters.
“Without the terrace, it would be very, very different,” Ms. Grane said. “I grab my glass of wine while the kids are doing other things and just sit there when the sun sets.”
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