A Sister Design Duo Brings Old-House Charm To A New Build in Fairhope, Alabama

Karen Lea Sandifer’s long love affair with Fairhope, Alabama, began during childhood summers spent on the bay. “We’d come over here from Mobile and rent houses,”  she recalls. Years later, as the artist and her husband, Jamey, raised their own children in Mobile, they made the same seasonal pilgrimages, trading their ranch style home in the city for carefree days  on the water and warm nights peeling shrimp on the wharf. Eventually, in 2015,  the couple built a spot of their own in the  area, and for a few years, they split time between the two places. “I kept staying in Fairhope longer and longer. Once I was sticking around from Thursday to Tuesday, we decided we might as well move here,” says Sandifer. Their vacation home wasn’t equipped  for full-time living, so they found a waterfront lot a mile down the road and hired someone to draw up a plan that’s better suited to their needs. A key priority was to maximize their pie-shaped parcel of land, which nearly doubles in width as it gets closer to Mobile Bay. Although the home is new construction, the couple aimed to infuse it with a sense of history.

“We wanted to build something that felt kind of old,” says Sandifer. They chose wall treatments that are rooted in the past, like board-and-batten and tongue-and-groove paneling, and requested warm wood floors plus lofty 12-foot ceilings. “For 25 years, we’d lived in a ranch house that had 8-foot ceilings, so I just wanted to recover from that,” Sandifer jokes.

When it came to the decor, the artist knew what she liked—muddy colors and comfortably casual furnishings. Still, she needed an experienced eye to pull it all together, so she brought on Rachel Anderson and Natalie Roe, the sisters behind local studio March + May Design. “In recent years, a lot of people have shown us Pinterest boards or screenshots of Instagram posts [for inspiration],” says Anderson. “But Karen came to us with a binder of ripped-out magazine pages with little arrows and sticky notes pointing to all these different things she loved. It was refreshing to have a tactile version of her vision.” 

Armed with printouts and fabric swatches, the designers got to work, sourcing new pieces and incorporating existing ones to achieve the collected feel that their clients were after. “They knew I didn’t want it to look like we had gone to the furniture store and bought everything all at once,” says Sandifer. In the entry, that meant including a wooden hat rack from the couple’s own stash alongside a custom, antique-inspired demilune table and a vintage rug found on Chairish. The same formula was applied to the dining room, where the decorators surrounded an old clean-lined table with white-painted rattan chairs upholstered in an outdoor fabric from Peter Dunham Textiles “for durability’s sake,” notes Anderson. The adjacent kitchen features a new-to-them antique platter hung over the range as easy-to-clean artwork along with worn-in barstools that were cut down to fit the height of the honed granite island.

A carefully selected color scheme (blues and greens, informed by the coastal environment, with occasional pops of red) also proved to be a unifying thread throughout the house. “Because  she’s an artist, Karen is particular about color and knows what she wants out of a shade,” says Anderson. The focal point of the living room, for instance, is a sofa with a saturated, seaworthy hue that’s a far cry from Sandifer’s self-proclaimed  “noncommittal decorating past,” in which she’d clung to white slipcovered sofas and relied on throw pillows for interest. A toned-down version of that aqua palette appears in the nearby primary suite, where a canopy bed with  striped fabric on the valance and blue green linen on the interior (prompted by the inspiration binder) is a highlight.  Wood-paneled ceilings washed in a coat of Sherwin-Williams’ Mountain Air  (SW 6224) mimic the “haint blue” paint  of historic Southern verandas. “There are a lot of older homes like this on the bay,” says Roe. “So many people enclose their  porches, and when they do that, they’re left with wood on the walls and ceiling.” 

Thoughtful design choices like these add up to a place that feels simultaneously fresh and perfectly at ease in its surroundings. “This house didn’t just happen overnight,” says Anderson of  her collaboration with the Sandifers. “We’ve been layering over the years. Maybe that’s why it looks so collected and loved—because that’s what it is.”