Interior designer Melanie Gowen helps a Nantucket family turn a negative to a positive with a reimagined pool house.

There is an expression, “Out of limitations comes creativity.”  Many great creations, in fact, were borne out of tragedy—chocolate chip cookies, penicillin and margarine to name a popular few. So, when there was a disastrous sewer accident at a Dukes Road home in Nantucket, the owners decided to seize the opportunity to transform an existing structure on the property into a pool cabana meets guest house to better support their growing family’s needs. 

Award-winning Nantucket interior designer Melanie Gowen says, “It was really a situation where we endeavored to make lemonade from lemons.” The homeowners came to her with the intent to put a pool on the lawn between the main house and the garage, which now had an opportunity to be reimagined. It needed to become a multifunctional space that would serve as a pool house, a guest space as well as a partial nanny quarters. 

Gowen set about working her creative magic within the parameters of budget and design preferences from the homeowner. She says, “With children of varying ages, it needed to stand up to bare feet running in and out, sand or grass coming in and be impervious to any kind of damage that may happen again.”