Carolina Architecture & Design ‘Low Country Retreat’

Feature Article

Low Country Retreat

Ohio stockbroker Larry Foster and his wife Diana weren’t in the market for a second home in January 1994. Larry Foster was reading the Wall Street Journal’s real estate section much more thoroughly than usual that day just to pass the time in a hospital waiting room. But as he idly scanned the newspaper pages, he found his attention returning to one ad in particular—the one offering island building lots on a 1770s-vintage South Carolina rice and indigo plantation.

“We were not looking to build a home, and we were not looking to move,” says Diana Foster, who heads a family foundation. “But we had planned a trip to visit friends in North Carolina, and even though South Carolina isn’t exactly on the way, Larry said, ‘Let’s go take a look at this place.’”

With its focus on rugged outdoor activities—hunting, sport shooting, fishing and horseback riding—and the island’s commitment to preserving the natural environment, the Fosters immediately recognized the potential for an ideal retreat for themselves and their close-knit family of five sons, four daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Longer term, the couple—now in their 50s—plan to retire to this home.

Tucked artfully into its marsh setting, the Foster home meanders among the property’s magnificent moss-draped live oaks, floating just above the ground in front on 30-foot pilings driven nearly to full depth. The property’s natural downward slope creates a more dramatic effect in the rear. The ingenious floor plan, with its three main sections positioned to capture the views and the breezes, is the work of Savannah-based architect, Gerry Cowart.

“My role was to find the beauty in the lot and to know how to capture it and wed it to what the home owners wanted,” says Cowart.

The home Diana Foster wanted was unlike any Cowart had designed before. Recalling fond childhood memories of her grandparents’ hunting lodge on Michigan’s Au Sable River, Diana Foster wanted to capture the rustic warmth and informality of the lodge while still fitting into its decidedly southern setting.

At their first meeting, Diana Foster asked Cowart “if he’d be interested in designing something quite different from what he usually designs—what I consider very southern homes.” When the architect agreed, the Fosters invited him to visit them in Ohio. “We asked him to come see where we live—in the woods, of course—and how we live—the fact that we’re very casual.”

“I saw two very confident people, comfortable in their lifestyle and mature in their relationship,” recalls Cowart of the weekend he spent at the Fosters’ Ohio home. Before the weekend was over, Cowart had filled a sketchbook with preliminary drawings, based on lengthy after-dinner discussions and the architect’s observations of the couple’s way of living.

“He started drawing plans while he was still at our house,” recalls Diana Foster. “The first drawings were rather rough, but we were very surprised at how well he captured the feeling we were trying to tell him about.”

“Every house I design is somebody’s dream, and a lot of times, they’ve been dreaming a long time,” explains Cowart. “Besides having the required competence of the mind, the architect has to have empathy of the heart to make the dream a reality—to satisfy the client’s desire to feel the house is theirs. It’s a sensitivity one must develop—an ability to look very deeply into the environment of clients’ lives and find an inspiration that’s true. The highest complement a client can pay me is to say, ‘He drew what I wanted.’”

Cowart next turned his attention to the building site. The Fosters had hired renowned landscape architect Robert Marvin, who developed the land use plan for the 5,585-acre island, to prepare a detailed analysis of their site. Cowart, who describes himself as a skilled naturalist and geologist, supplemented Marvin’s factual analysis with his own more intuitive study of the site’s ecosystem.

The heavily wooded site has 230 feet of frontage on the marsh, centered by an estuary. Cowart made the view of the converging tides the focal point for the home’s organization and structure. “Very early on, I knew I wanted to string this house out so every room had a view of the marsh and exposure to its breezes,” says Cowart.

“In Ohio, we’re not used to a lot of air conditioning,” says Diana Foster. “We prefer to live with the doors and windows open.” The screened porch connecting the main section of the house to the guesthouse is a favorite spot for enjoying breezes off the marsh.

The Fosters’ desire to preserve as much as possible of the natural environment influenced virtually every aspect of design and construction. Early in the project, they hired Thomas Angell, project manager for the site analysis by Robert Marvin, to handle landscape architecture. Since finishing the site analysis, Angell had left Marvin’s firm to start his own business.

“The site analysis entails coming to understand the existing conditions and allowing that understanding to influence the placement of the structures,” explains Angell, who worked closely with Cowart throughout the project. “You consider ground vegetation, trees and shrubbery not shown on the original survey, breezes and solar aspects—all the characteristics of the site as the context in which you’re building.”

Before construction began, the Fosters hired a professional arborist to fertilize and prune the trees. “The arborist got the trees tuned up for the inevitable stress of construction, and did any tricky removals of fallen trees,” says Angell. “He also gave detailed recommendations for tree care, which the Fosters diligently followed. They were totally committed to preserving the natural environment.”

To further minimize damage to the environment while giving the structure a sound footing on marshy soil, Cowart specified a driven pile foundation. “The pilings did a lot of things for us,” he explains.

“We knew we were on the downhill side of an old bluff, and the ground slopes markedly. We wanted to claim that down-slope as ours without disturbing the existing grade at all. But if we did, the house would act as a dam in high water events. The pilings allow the natural drainage pattern to continue right under the house.”

At the edge of the marsh, Cowart says, “The soil was like pudding. By driving the pilings down to a solid sand substrate—the best thing you can build on—we were able to disperse the load through the mud to the sand.

Finally, the pilings would cause minimal damage to tree roots. “A piling may miss tree roots completely, or at worst, damage only a few,” says Cowart. “We were also able to keep trees within four or five feet of the house.”

While often used to support commercial buildings, docks and piers, builder James H. “Hammy” Langford says a driven pile foundation is unusual in residential construction. “There was a lot of attention given to engineering the girder and pile system,” says Langford, “and some of the most difficult aspects of the project revolved around the foundation.”

Langford says maneuvering the pile driving rig and its crane-mounted 60-foot boom among the thick trees was a challenge, as was the placement and assembly of the structural members. “The largest structural members commonly available for residential construction are two-by-12s,” he says. Cowart’s plan specified treated double 2x16s measuring 25 to 40 feet long. “The size and weight of the materials made it very time-consuming and very physically challenging.”

With the foundation in place, Langford began building the house, section by section. Before building and installing the kitchen cabinets, Langford constructed them in Styrofoam and duct tape. “We kept lopping off the center island until the design really worked,” says Diana Foster. “Put an enlightened client in a room with an enlightened builder and an enlightened architect, add some Styrofoam and duct tape, and you end up with a great kitchen,” comments Cowart. The finished cabinets are of pecky cypress, topped by Vermont marble.

As a skilled woodworker and cabinetmaker, Langford found the interior finishing to be the most gratifying stage of the project. “The amount of wood in that house is unbelievable, and that made it especially enjoyable for me to build,” he says. Most interior floors, walls and ceilings are of antique heart pine recovered and re-milled by Ramsey Khaladi, a Savannah-based antique lumber dealer who also restores endangered historic structures. The wood for the Foster project came from cotton warehouses, the oldest dating to the 1850s.

“At the time, it was the largest order we’d ever processed, and I was thinking, ‘This is insane,’” Khaladi recalls. “They bought 50,000 board feet—enough for 20,000 to 25,000 square feet of usable material, plus some extra, plus some pecky cypress from another source.” Khaladi rented a warehouse he owns to the Fosters for a year so they could store the heart pine until it was time to ship it in three tractor-trailer loads to the building site.

Langford sorted through the heart pine, reserving the very best material for the section of the house containing the living room, dining area, kitchen and mudroom. He set aside the pieces with the tightest grain—making them the hardest and most durable—for high traffic areas, such as the glassed-in corridor leading to the master bedroom section. The next-hardest flooring went into the master bedroom, while Langford used the softest in two upstairs guest bedrooms connected by a loft overlooking the living room.

The loft, flanked by two guest bedrooms, is a favorite of the Fosters’ grandchildren. They particularly enjoy the antique hobbyhorse, a gift to the Foster’s eldest son purchased in England by Diana Foster’s grandmother. “All my children and grandchildren have played on and ridden the hobbyhorse in the loft,” says Diana Foster.

Langford used the pecky cypress, which he describes as, “some of the highest quality I’ve seen,” for the kitchen cabinets and in a study. In the guesthouse, attached to the home’s main section by a screened porch, Langford finished the interior with new yellow pine. He used all-new stock on the home’s exterior. “The distinctive thing about the Foster house is its ‘lodgy’ feel,” says Langford, who has worked with Cowart on a number of other homes. “All the wood gives it a very distinctive, very low country kind of atmosphere.”

As construction progressed, interior designer Corinne Reeves was already hard at work on plans for furnishing the massive home. From the outset, Reeves wanted to create an interior in which her design efforts were invisible. “I didn’t want the house to look decorated,” she explains.

“Almost all the furniture is from our house in Ohio,” says Diana Foster. “I’d describe it as one step up from rustic.”

In addition to family antiques, the couple had a number of antiques they had collected through the years. “There is a town just across the Michigan border—Saline—noted for their antique mart,” says Diana Foster. “They have anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dealers one weekend a month, nine months a year, and we’ve been going there an average of four times a year for 30 years. Sometimes we walk away with something wonderful, and sometimes not.”

Reeves was able to incorporate virtually all the Fosters’ furnishings into the new home’s interior design. “We started with some wonderful antique rugs,” she says. “We took the strong, rich color palette from them.” Major pieces she acquired were a large sofa and chairs, bought used and reupholstered in leather. The only new furniture is in the dining room and on the screened porch. “The dining room chairs are new reproductions, upholstered in block panels of chenille,” says Reeves. “They make the dining room probably the most decorated-looking room in the house.”

The dining room’s 15-foot trestle table is from an indoor riding arena that belonged to Diana Foster’s grandparents. “They have a large family,” says Reeves, “so this long table is a great gathering place.” In the mud room, there’s a saddle from the riding ring. “Nothing is superfluous,” says Reeves. “Everything in the house means something to them.

Reeves says she did nothing to lighten or brighten the interior’s floor-to-ceiling wood. “The house is built in three sections,” she notes, “and what’s coherent from section to section is the wood. I relied on strong colors and strong, simple pieces bring the interior together.”

While Reeves developed and implemented the interior design master plan, Diana Foster was adding special touches of her own. She found an artist who hand-paints ceramic tiles and commissioned her to create tiles featuring “very southern, very primitive marsh scenes. I needed her to be a southern Grandma Moses.”

A friend who lives on the island painted a mural featuring a panoramic plantation scene—masterful artwork Diana Foster describes as “much too nice for a powder room.”

After Cowart showed the Fosters some custom-made ironwork by John Boyd Smith, an ornamental blacksmith in Savannah, the couple hired Smith to design and build a chandelier for the living room, along with hardware to be used on doors throughout the house. “We wanted the chandelier to depict animals indigenous to Brays Island,” says Diana Foster. “We wanted the style to be very primitive.”

While the clients focused attention on the chandelier’s style and design details, Smith says he was most concerned about its proportion and scale. “Scale and proportion are everything,” he maintains. “We spent a lot of time up front sizing the chandelier in correct proportion for this huge, massive room. The bigger the object, the more critical it is. If you miss it, you’re dead.”

The resulting chandelier is about seven feet across and weighs in at a hefty 1,200 pounds. The weight of the finished fixture was not a consideration since the room’s massive exposed timbers were capable of supporting many times the chandelier’s weight. A lower ring features cutout silhouettes of indigenous animals, while a smaller upper ring depicts island activities. Smith left the polished iron finish natural, rubbing it with boiled linseed oil to form a rustproof coating. Once the oil dries, Smith applies a coat of varnish for a finish he says “will last indoors for years.” He describes the appearance of the iron as “an antique silver, with hues of black and silver.” The visible hammer work emphasizes the chandelier’s handcrafted origins.

The day Smith arrived to install the finished chandelier, Langford and his crew were obviously skeptical. “We build gates that weigh four tons, so this 1,200 pound chandelier was not a particularly difficult installation,” says Smith, “but those guys were not engineers, and the wires we were using looked like spider web.” Smith earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech in 1972.

“We had it strung up on wires that had a safety factor of five or six, and once it was high enough to walk under, I stood under it and had my guys bounce it up and down. The builder said, ‘Boy, that was really impressive.’”

“I told Johnny Smith, ‘If that thing ever falls, it’s going through the floor like a cookie cutter,” says Langford, laughing.

Outdoors, Angell was completing his landscaping work. “Getting that building in there created destruction that had to be repaired,” says Angell. “The key to the success of the plan was saving and protecting as much of the existing vegetation as possible. Hammy is good at that but, as always, there was a zone of disturbance that had to be mitigated in some way. Our approach was to put nature back, and do it with an artistic flair.”

Angell introduced a number of indigenous plants to the landscape, as well as transplanting mature plants from other parts of the island. Among the most significant new plants were yaupon holly, saw palmetto, beautyberry, serviceberry, American tea olive and sweet pepper bush. In areas left open for drainage beneath the pilings, Angell planted ferns and native grasses. In the one sunny spot, he planted a native grass garden.

Angell designed steel borders for the gravel drive and parking areas using graceful, free-flowing lines running through the trees. “We didn’t want it to look like a parking lot,” he explains.

When the Fosters unexpectedly acquired a number of camellia bushes, Angell integrated them into his original plan. “Even though the plan emphasized native plants, Diana Foster also wanted traditional southern favorites,” recalls Angell. “The Fosters were able to purchase a rather distinguished collection of camellias that had to be worked into the garden. The drive island became a camellia walk with a pathway between two rows of large camellias, with the ends anchored by magnolia trees.”

The “very minimalist” irrigation system Angell installed on the property will be turned off after the first three years. “One of the key advantages of using all native plants is, once they’re established, they can survive quite well without much help,” he explains. Maintaining the home’s native landscape, says Angell, “mostly involves pruning and manipulating what’s there. There is no lawn to mow. It’s more a matter of creative management.”

Since completing their Brays Island home, the Fosters have tried to spend at least part of every month there, and their sons visit often, bringing their families with them. Now that they have sold their Ohio home and moved into a condominium, the Fosters long for their Carolina spaciousness and privacy more than ever before. “We love the house, and we’re really looking forward to retiring there,” says Diana Foster. “Once we get down there, I don’t plan to leave.”