House Tour | The Beach Cabin | Interior Designer Lauren Liess Beach House Tour

Welcome to the beach cabin. I am so excited to show you this place. We bought it just over a year ago and really fell for this one. So if you notice me looking a little bit sad during the tour, it's only because I love this house so much. It's a bittersweet situation, but we are so happy for this place to go to the new owners and I cannot wait to share it with you. Um, the exterior you'll notice, it really doesn't look much different than it did when we got it, which was my intention. The color is almost identical to the original color. I really wanted this place to just feel as if we'd done nothing to it. Sometimes that is the design intent. We kept the original decks and simply power wash them. We also kept the original railings, shore them up in some places. We had all of the front original windows redone. They are the originals, but we put new glass in them. I wanted to keep that summer camp vibe. We also of course kept the front screen for, I love the geometric shape here. We had to have it remade and we fitted it with copper screen and still flans the best down Southern summers. So come on in. So this is the queen bedroom. It didn't really change much in here. Had a new fan. I wanted to keep all of the original board and batten throughout the entire house. This room has a nice size closet. When we first got here, both this room and the king bedroom were the exact same size, but you'll see we made some changes over there to accommodate a king bed. So this room is tiny. And so we just did a really simple floating leather headboard. It is nailed into the wall and secure. So it takes up very little space in the room lengthwise to allow people to kind of walk around the bed freely. We did the tiniest little mid-century inspired nightstands and I wanted to go with this sort of earthy summer camp vibe in this house. So you'll notice kind of a lot of those little fifties, sixties kind of like cabin in the woods type details or summer camp details. So I've got this all of green linen duvet cover here. And then this is a camp that quilt here. It's black with all of green and a little bit of blue and turquoise running through it. I've got these really kind of earthy toned block print patterns here. Another one with blue in it and just kept things really simple and added sort of little nautical nods throughout the house. So here I've got these tiny little vintage paintings over the bed, like to keep them minuscule because I sometimes think it's more interesting when you put something small where you would have expected something large. So I think it gives it a little bit of that little quirky feeling. I love these nightstands are the tiniest little mid-century nightstands I could find to fit on either side of the bed. And then I love, love, love this lamp. It's this really cool basket with handles on it. And then the painting above is vintage. Now I'm going to take you across the hall to the king bedroom. I want to show you guys something cool about this door here. It says Ann on it and little wooden letters. We kept those. We bought the house from Ann, bought our house from Ann. So we thought it was neat to keep the original owner's name on the door here. And there is a lot to talk about with this door. Actually this door actually used to be over here. And just like the queen bedroom, there used to be a closet running from here to here. And there was zero chances of getting a king bed in this room. And we really felt like a king bed was necessary for whoever rented or bought this house. So we pulled the closet out, put a tiny little closet in over here and then took the door and moved it over so you could get into the room. And now we can fit a king bed, which is kind of everything. When you have husband and lots of children who want to climb in the bed with you every night. I don't know. I felt like this helped things a lot. So we've got our king bed and this bed is actually from my collection with Taylor King. And we did it in a really pretty sort of oatmeal-y ivory linen bedding. I wanted to keep to the earthy tones here. I got this sort of burnt orange linen bedspread. I love, love, love the pillows in this room. This is Lauren Lee's Fernstar. Fernstar is one of my favorites. And then we found all these really beautiful handblock printed fabrics and earth tones that work really well with them. A little bit of the olive, little bit of the rust. And then I love the sheets in this room. They're this really pretty striped linen. I just love the bedding in this room. For shades, we did the same ones that we did in the queen bedroom, which I don't think I showed you. And these are just really simple matchstick roll-up shades. Love them for the vibe of this house. Again, one of that summer camp with a simple laid back vintage thing going on. So totally think those shades have it. Because we got rid of the closet, we were able to fit two, three foot wide dressers in this room, which is sort of everything because the closet is tiny that we have now. So we needed really good storage on either side of the bed. So nightstands would not have worked. We needed real dressers here. These are the super cool rattan and then oak. We also actually had to cut these dressers down. They were maybe four or six inches higher. And because of the sort of the low height of the bed and I wanted them to have a bit more of a mid-century feel, I actually went and we, well, I say I, but actually one of our contractors, Scott went and cut them down on top. We have these really pretty lamps. We sell them in the shop. They're by Troy lighting, love them. And then just more kind of vintage pieces I collected over time. I'll show you this painting that I am obsessed with. I love all the art in this room. Last week, Dave and I and the kids brought all of our stuff over here and we tried out living in the beach cabin. And we were 99.9% sure that we were going to move here. In the end, I couldn't leave my cottage. I just wasn't ready. We put the house on the market and it sold right away. So I'm saying goodbye to it. But what I will say is in my little time living here, I think we're here for like four or five days. I loved this little spot so much. It was just such a pretty little spot. This painting is something that someone on my team found it's vintage oil on the board and I just love it so much. This is something I've had for a lot of years and just some yarrow it's dead now, but I still think it's pretty. And then this cool little marble jewelry box here. So this is like a little spot of respite for me when I was here. The fan is awesome. It is small, but it packs such a punch. It puts off just as much air as a regular ceiling fan. I loved sleeping with this thing. I wish I didn't need ceiling fans to sleep, but I always have. And I probably always will, especially as I get older. So this one was a good one. This artwork over here is some of my favorite. I have had these pieces for so long, just waiting for the right place to use them. And I was so excited when I brought them here. I could not believe how they worked out the rusty, the burnt kind of Sienna and rusty red tones are perfect with the bedding and the subject matter is the ocean. So for me, it was like this when those went on the wall, it was like this aha moment where this whole room came together. Sometimes things just work out like that. And when they do, I love it. Also in small rooms, one of my tips would be hooks. Hooks are awesome. Especially at the beach. People always have wet bathing suits, robes, that kind of thing in tiny rooms. I feel like they do a lot of the work. So highly recommend hooks. Hey guys, I am so excited to share with you what we have been doing in our family to get our bread. We have been using wild grain. Wild grain gives us all of the benefits of sourdough without the hard work. It comes frozen in a bag and you literally just have to unwrap it, preheat your oven and stick it in completely frozen without even a pan. I don't even have to clean a pan. Okay. This is amazing. I'm going to wait 20 minutes. I'm going to have a little charcuterie work with the family. All right. Look how good this looks. This smells so good. All right, here we go. All right, everybody. The sourdough is ready. Wild grain uses a slow fermentation process. That's easier on your belly, richer in nutrients and antioxidants and can even help lower blood sugar spikes. To check out wild grain, be sure to click on my link in the description and use my code, healthy Lauren 30 to get $30 off your first box. Plus you'll get free croissants for life. All right. It's coming back into the hallway. I realized I didn't really talk about the foyer much. The runners are one of my favorites. They're the perfect beach rugs. All of the sand kind of wipes off on your feet when you walk by them. They kind of like collect the sand underneath. So they really are awesome. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Another thing I really love in the foyer is this picture. It's a photograph from my collection with one Kings lane. It is one of my favorites. It's sort of a dune grass photo and it could not be more perfect for the beach. We did a huge mirror here when you first walk in, which is really great. And it's got sort of a portal look to it, which I love here. We just have these little, little bottles from our shop. Love them. They're great. You can put water in them, little dune grasses and plants and that kind of thing. But even when they're empty to me, they have that sort of message in a bottle kind of beach house vibe to them. The twin bedroom is really one of my favorite rooms in the house. I love this little bedroom. It's so sweet. I went with Jenny Lynn style beds, love them. They bring that vintage just kind of timeless feeling to the space. We've got this big old lamp here on this little end table. This is called the sincerity table. This is from my collection with Woodbridge. I love it. It's really simple. It's got a drawer in there and then just a shelf beneath for things right now. It's just bases. You might recognize there's another Fernstar in a different colorway here. This is in our sepia colorway. These are vintage pillows here on the bed. Just went with really simple oatmeal, linen bedding, and then two different Kampa quilts, just sort of a mix and match feel. I want it to feel casual and sort of collected. So didn't want it to match too, too perfectly because everything else does. This old little fish trap here hanging just kind of gives that little bit of vintage coastal vibe. And this piece here that says heartkeeper is it's sort of a long story. But when I was writing my book, beach life, I kind of had this word vomit that came out of me. And it was all about how the first time you see the ocean sort of feels like it like takes a little piece of your heart and then you leave, but it's a little piece of you is left by the ocean. And so my sort of name for the ocean is heartkeeper because it keeps a little piece of your heart. And I think it does that in order to sort of keep us coming back and to keep going back every year to see the ocean. And hopefully when we see the ocean and we kind of get that little moment with the ocean, kind of go back out into the world doing better and feeling better and kind of being a better person. So a long story short is I did a little children's book, read a little children's book off of that. And it was called heartkeeper. I've not published it yet. Haven't even shown my publisher yet. So hopefully they like it one day. But this was the doodle I made sort of showing how heartkeeper would look. It would be sort of a charcoal, really simple, kind of sketched out type of book, little like moments about bonding at the beach and kids going to the beach and, and seeing the heartkeeper and all that. So that you will see comes into play in the other room in a very, very big way. But that is our sweet little twin bedroom. This was one of the rooms that made me want to move here the most because I had, I think Aurora in this bed and Giselle in that bed. And we'd tuck the girls in and things were so organized and the closet so big, really loved it. So we have all five of our kids in one bedroom at the other cottage. So this was a luxury. Oh, also the rug in here is awesome, super durable. And this baby is machine washable and very earthy. These have those rust tones that are kind of running throughout the house in them. And it feels so, so soft and you do not have to worry about it. I am now going to show you something awesome. There is a little secret room up here. We didn't even put it on the real estate listing when we sold the house last week. It is awesome. I'm going to show you. There is a way if we kept the house to add stairs in the front, sort of out of the closet in the queen bedroom, but there's a very simple way for now we're going to use the pull downstairs. Come on up. You're going to love it. This is not the best attic climbing outfit. I dressed up for you guys. Okay. So how cool is this room? I love it so much. It's not actually quite as dark as it probably looks to you because it's all kind of backlit, but it is dark right now. We kind of had a stormy day today, but anyway, this is one of our favorite spots in the house. We just did a pair of beds up here and a cool old treasure trunk chest here. And one of my rugs, the juniper jute tile rug. And okay, no, it seems very weird that we have taxidermy up here and I am not a taxidermy person. Actually, you really, really love animals. And I got this from dune house. He was sold with the other house that we had and he looks so much like our geese who died that I could not get rid of him. I don't really know what to do with him. So I put him up here in the attic. I figured I wanted this place to sort of be like being like the attic and Goonies or something where there's just like cool, creepy things to discover. So I figured why not put our sweet little goose up here? We've got this old painting here. I love this piece here. I feel like he's finally found his home and this vintage lamp that looked to us kind of like a lighthouse. And then this old rattan baskets, again, the chest old books in there. We've got seashells in there, some dried Russian olives and one of our netted big vases from the shop and then a vintage lantern and some old cork buoys. So really just some things that, I don't know, just felt like curiosities and something that may have been up here. I mean, I'm not sure most addicts are this artful and spider list, but there are a lot of spiders down in the Outer Banks. This wallpaper is amazing. It's called captain's log, a link to that as well. And if you look really closely on it, you can see that there's notes from a captain when he was on a ship and it's sort of drawings of different things. They saw fish, they found ships, that kind of thing. It's super cool. I felt like this would be such a cool space to kind of fall asleep. And as a kid, maybe with a bunch of cousins squeezed in, there's definitely room for at least two more beds up here, which I would do if we kept the house for sure. I just wanted to make it feel like one of those places that kids could kind of disappear to just give it that sort of nostalgic vintage vibe, that vintage summer vibe, that feeling of endless summers, long days, storytelling, all of that. And so I think this, this room really hits home for me and our kids loved it. So I hope the new owners enjoy it. So we didn't make many changes in the bathroom, but they were high impact changes. We kept the board and batten and we kept the cabinets. So as you can see here, I will show you in the kitchen, but the way this board and batten and cabinetry was done is just artful. It's incredible. We replaced the old countertops. I think they were for Micah with a white honed marble. There used to be only one sink. So we did a pair of sinks with brass faucets here. I did these cool brass arch mirrors. I thought that the roundness would be great with all the square lines that we have everywhere, all the rectangular shapes, the original floors were hardwood. So we took those out to put something a little bit more maintenance friendly in and we did this glazed white, creamy sort of multicolor hand glazed terracotta tile. The shower, I just love, love, love. It is one of my favorite spots here and it is another hand glazed green tile. It is so pretty. We had, I think you saw the videos, but we had a lot of family love time and attention put on the shower here. We did get a new tub, cast iron, new toilet, new hardware, new sort of nautical lighting on the ceiling and on the sconces. So the washer dryer situation, funny, when I first saw this house, I thought it was so weird that they were in the bathroom and I thought if we moved here, I would have to move them. Well, after being here for that week, last week, I fell in love with having the washer dryer in the bathroom. It was amazing. I've never been so on top of my laundry before. It was amazing. Very, very convenient. We bought an entire set of these sort of almond colored towels for the house, thinking with renters in mind and then here are all the extra sheet sets and everything for the house. It just has a lot of storage and everything fits really well and really you never forget to do your laundry. So I love that. And I loved getting to touch the curtains all the time because they are so pretty. The curtains match the shower curtain. In fact, I just bought three shower curtains. These are by Le Indien and I just love them. They're hand block printed in this green olive pattern. It's one of my favorites. The carpentry in this house is amazing. In fact, all of the architecture is. The architects studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and there are some amazing things about this house. So as you'll see, when we get to the kitchen, kind of look at the board and battens, wherever there's a transition or something stops, you can see that the battens just follow through so perfectly. You don't see craftsmanship a lot like this these days. So when I walked in here, I was just blown away and fell in love with it. I was kind of jaw dropped and wishing I'd never seen it because I knew once I saw it that I really, really wanted it and we were not trying to take on another project, but fell in love and we did. So I guess that's what we do. I see things that look like they need a little bit of love and a little bit of help. And then I, uh, I cannot not see what they should be and then just kind of go for it sometimes. So some of these are not original. You can't even tell. I mean, she had green stains out. She had multicolor honey and Brown and all these stains to really get these boards and the battens to look like the original ones. I mean, there are new boards happening on the ceiling from where we added the light fixture. We added HVAC throughout the house. So a lot of holes, a lot of opening up needs to happen in the space and you really can't tell. So I'm just so pleased with our team. They did an amazing job, uh, costing creations. They're awesome and we could not be happier when it comes to the kitchen. We had cousins stay here right when we first got the house and it had not been redone. And I realized how handy this closet is in the kitchen. I just love it. I mean, it's just a bifold closet, tons of space. It's awesome for renters or people staying temporarily because people come with all their bags and all their things. And so it's just like this nice big empty blank closet. We got so lucky with this dining table. This dining table came with June house, the other house that we redid around the same time. And it was really yellowy orangey, but we had it sanded and then reoiled. So Kelly took this whole thing with a belt sander and then we put Rubio stain on it. And we just did a wax, just a natural wax finish on there with a little bit of white in it so that it would look basically unfinished. And I love it. It is so pretty. I do not know what a new table like this would have cost. It is over 48 inches wide. So when we have family here, we've come and done boils and parties. We have put two chairs at the end. So really it seats, what is that for? It seats 12 really, really easily and you can actually seat more than that here. We've got the good old branch vase from my shop. I am obsessed with it and I put these branches in and they're already wilting. And this candelabra and the little snuffers also from our shop. We use the candles all the time when we're here. It's just got such an old fashioned vintage vibe in this place when you're cooking and having meals and the candles are lit and you can see everything. So we really, really love it. Like I mentioned earlier, I really wanted the house to feel as if we had never been here and as if everything was original. So we kept the original cabinetry. It could not be more perfect for the house. It's the original board and batten and this is one of those little craftsmanship details I was talking about. But if you look at the ceiling, so if you follow a batten down, it literally hits the cabinet and the battens or the hardware, which is beautiful. So you follow the batten down onto the top of the cabinet. Then you hit countertop and then it goes right on back down and follows perfectly to the lower cabinets. When I saw that, the first time I walked through this house, I was like, Oh my gosh, I love it. I need it. So it's just, I love details like that. And you really just do not see houses like this. So I didn't want to touch the cabinets. So all we did was take off the original Formica countertops, which I didn't mind that much, but I really did want to go with something more natural on a stone and something a little bit moodier. They were white. I went with this dark gray soapstone here. I love soapstone. It has such a beautiful touch and feel to it. Just so soft and chalky. And I loved how it felt with the old pine paneling here. The sink is brass and new. There you go. And these are the original windows with new glass in them. Of course, we did a stainless steel dishwasher. Oh, and we had Kelly make one of the original, there was a trash compactor over there. So we took that out and had one of the cabinets turned into a trash pull out and we went with an induction range. I love induction. I will never go back to gas or electric. It is my favorite. You can boil pots so quickly. I've used this one a bit. This one is Thor. I can't say I like it more or less than any of the other inductions that I've had, but I highly recommend induction. Just got to know that you're getting the right cookware. That's going to work with it, which we have here. We were lucky enough that when we bought June house, it came with a whole house full of cookware. And so we brought a lot of that over here. I also had fun here shopping for all of the plates, glasses, silverware, and you'll see the plates are kind of this cool little camp vibe. Again, the chairs are Saarinen style chairs, tulip chairs. I am not going to lie. I've had some really good times in here with friends from the town and spinning and wine and possibly tequila. So these chairs are really, really fun. Okay. The living room has my heart for real. Remember the heartkeeper little sketch, my charcoal sketch that's hanging in the twin bedroom. Well, that sketch is what inspired this fireplace wave that you see here. The first time I saw this house, the fireplace was done and the cinder blocks, the same cinder block you see here on the hearth. And I really wanted to bring some nature into the house. I wanted to soften it a bit and I wanted to put something on there that really spoke to the ocean and tile just didn't feel right to me. The cinder block didn't quite feel finished. So I had this idea to collect seashells. And so we collected seashells for a long, long time. And we finally got enough to make the heartkeeper wave shape on the fireplace. So I know you saw that earlier in the video. This was a real labor of love. It was so much fun to do. Also one of the things that made me never want to leave this house, but also so excited for somebody else to get to enjoy it. I hope they know that a lot of love was put into that and that we're so happy for them to have this place and get to enjoy it with their family and friends for lots of years to come. So what we did here was pretty simple. I don't think I explained much in the video. We first took the charcoal, the same charcoal I made the sketch with, and I just drew this all along here as you saw on the video. And then we took all of the darker shells and I made sure that directionally they were facing that way as if they were getting swept up in a wave. And then I kind of rolled them out that way. And at the same time we applied the light shells. We had to apply the dark and the light at the same time because we had to go where it was wet, dry very quickly. And so all of the white shells are applied vertically. So they don't look like they're getting swept up in a wave. I think you could have made this entire pattern even without a color variation because you would see the directions of the shells kind of creating wave, but more impactful with the black and the gray shells being the heartkeeper wave. So that is one of my favorite things in the house for sure. This coffee table here is available in our shop and has a really great mid-century sort of mushroom shape to it. I love it. These chairs are a mid-century Spanish reproduction. They're leather. I love them. They're from Francois and Co. Love this lamp got the woven top here and they're really cool kind of plastered like base. This big Demi John is from our shop. I have lots of them. I have an obsession with them. So there's lots of different colors and shapes and sizes in our shop with them. The rug here is a cotton wool blend. I love it. It feels so great underfoot and it cleans up really well. We've had a lot of people in this house. We had cousins come to stay for a little bit when it was still being completed and it cleans up beautifully. The artwork here is some of my favorite. This piece here is the ghost fleet of the outer bank. So it shows, it's crazy. They call the outer banks, the graveyard of the Atlantic and it shows all of the different shipwrecks along the coast at different times in this area in the outer banks. And this actually came with dune house and was a piece we really loved and we just felt like it was a little bit more at home here in the cabin. And this piece here is an abstract from my collection with one King's lane. And I love the juxtaposition of the modern and then the vintage here and a little bit of history. And then the accessories here are kind of a cool collection, little bottles that we have. It's from our shop, uh, coral. And then we have these old vintage ships that we found cool old books. The boy scouts mountain camp, just really cool little green things, books that sort of have to do with camping, summer camp, an old crock here, candles. And then I'm going to show you this. This is something that I cannot leave with this house because I'm so obsessed with it. It's this barnacle bottle. So it's coming home with me, but it just, to me, it's like that total message in a bottle, crazy old bottle. I love it. Doesn't even have a bottom here and all the barnacles on it. So that is going to come home with me and I brought it in for the photo shoot and for you guys to see, I'll put that back there. We had so much fun hunting for old treasures to fill this place up with. I love to forage around here for interesting plants and flowers to display throughout the cabin. I like them even when they've dried out like the little bit of bamboo on the console. I went with a simple slip covered sofa by my friend Leanne Ford with more Lauren Lee's textiles, Fernstar. We lost audio for this part of the tour. Sorry guys, we're new with this. So to summarize, the living room is the space that really made me fall for the beach cabin. There's this amazing feeling you get when you enter a home through a smaller space like the front hall that then opens up into a larger space. It creates a sense of surprise and delight where everything wasn't given away at once, but revealed slowly with intention. It makes the main living space feel all the more special. We have fit so many humans into the space during big dinners with friends and family, and it's handled it all so beautifully. This green porch has been a favorite hangout of ours. We've had some beautiful weather here when we're able to just have the doors open throughout the evening, which completely expands the living space. Dave and I will be inside and the kids will be outside just hanging out and it's so, so wonderful. We rebuilt the structure of the porch as needed and replaced all of the original copper screening furnishing it simply with hanging swings and Adirondack chairs. I am now coming out of the primary bedroom door. I popped out there, but I came around to show you, this is the outdoor shower. We added it. We also did concrete on the fireplace. It used to be cinder block. Just wanted a bit more finished of a feeling here. And so come on in. This is the outdoor shower. Love, love, love the shower. Now. I absolutely love showering here. The view is so pretty. The outdoor showers are just super simple and they've got foot hoses on them, which is very handy when you're washing that standoff on the beach. And after the boys painted it green, it just got so cozy. I love the seashells here and we just kind of pile different things like stones and we use a lot of cleats around here or towel hooks because things rust when you're this close to the ocean. So the cleats are really nice because they don't rest in here. One of the things we had to be really careful of when painting was this little clump of Virginia creeper. I love it. It's a native plant and it grows around here and I just think it's going to be so pretty when it starts growing up on these walls. And I love that you can just kind of walk out this door and go to the king bedroom, or you can walk out this door. All right. So signing off from the beach cabin. This was such a labor of love. Love doing this project. Can't say love enough and I'm really happy to have shared this with you guys. Cameraman, you got to come here. Cameraman, this is Dave. You guys know him. He's usually behind the camera unless he's on HGTV pretending to be a contractor. Actually, you really were kind of a contractor in this job, right? Came in with the last minute tiling, needed all that. So any last words before we leave? I'm going to miss this place. I'm going to miss it too. It was a good one. So thanks for coming along with us. We hope you enjoyed. Unlike most of our design projects, which are painstakingly planned out with a clear path and goals in mind, the beach cabin was a sort of wander. We didn't know if we would keep it as a vacation rental, if we would sell it or if we would move into it ourselves. Wandering is a slower way of being in which point A's and B's don't exist. We may set out to do one thing, but then end up doing another. With no set destination, we let life unfold. There is such a freedom and a wander going where your curiosity takes you. The beach cabin was our wander. The beach cabin gave us the sense of freedom in which we embarked on an adventure, not knowing where we were going. We loved involving our kids in the renovation, teaching them valuable skills and giving them a sense of pride in the place. We loved getting to experience life, the beach cabin with our friends and family. This wasn't an easy house to say goodbye to. We really love this one and it's an iconic spot in the village, but the beach cabin has now been passed on to an amazing family who treasures it as much as we did. If you'd like to see the full episode renovation of the beach cabin, check out our new beach house series, saving lost cottages, where we chronicle the renovation of beach house projects with our family and the outer banks. My book Beach Life features the beach cabin along with a bunch of other projects of ours and is all about experiencing life on the coast and what it does for you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It's available where books are sold online and in lots of small design stores and bookstores and gift shops along the coast. And if you're enjoying our videos, please be sure to subscribe to our new channel. We so appreciate your support. Subscriptions allow us to hire editors and get more videos and better content out to you. Thank you so much.