Set Sail — A Luxury Liner on Longboat Key

   With the ambiance of exotic ports of call, this truly unique waterfront home embraces with the warmth and elegance of a luxury cruise liner. From the front, a taste of the Orient with touches of Thai-inspired embellishments. Inside, clean contemporary lines with a serene Asian sensibility frame a backdrop for sweeping water views.
   Perched on a broad bayfront point in the Country Club Shores neighborhood on southern Longboat Key, this 5-year-old home was custom-designed by award-winning, local architect Frank Folsom Smith.The original owners, a Colorado couple, were particularly fond of luxury cruise ships, and the home reflected this, with its dark paneling, cloistered corridors and small high-set windows.
   Becky Martel-Parsons, owner of Becky Martel Ventures in Sarasota, wanted to open and lighten the space and, most of all, to take advantage of the property’s spectacular bay views. But the house was built out to every inch of the lot’s allowable building envelope, so any changes would have to be achieved within the original footprint. She also wanted to render the home’s exterior, a highly personal expression of the original owners’ tastes, a little more into the mainstream.
   The home’s Asian flavor began with a few key elements. She chose to keep original teak lattice railing. And, as a stunning focal point to the facade, she replaced a grizzly bear sculpture with an antique Thai ceiling panel. The huge, intricately carved medallion sits atop a broad waterfall cascade spilling from the pool behind. Martel-Parsons had iron lattice panels built to frame the piece, giving it the mystique of an ancient entry gate. “It serves several purposes,” she said. “It sets the tone, gives the entrance drama and serves to screen the pool area for privacy.”
   Solid gray siding was replaced with cedar-shake shingles, and a cedar pergola shades the entry. On an elevated courtyard at the front of the home, lattice-panel fencing encloses a pool, spa and covered outdoor living space with summer kitchen.“I wasn’t sure about the pool being in the front of the house,” says Martel-Parsons. “But I’ve learned that the house shelters it from winds off the bay, and it’s actually more private than the waterfront.”
   Enter the home through an oversized, lattice-paneled door. A corridor, floored in slate tile, features a row of shoulder-height windows and sliding glass doors overlooking the pool courtyard, with a gallery of wall space for displaying artwork on the opposite wall. This passageway opens to a spacious, salon-like kitchen and dining room.
   Slate tile floors continue through this long room with mahogany-hued cabinetry wrapping the walls. Floor-toceiling, wall-to-wall paneled cabinets extend from the dining room’s entertainment center into the kitchen, where they wrap around and continue on in the base of a broad peninsula, separating kitchen from dining room. More base cabinets extend along the far wall of the dining room, and doors are of
louvered wood panels. Originally painted beige, Martel-Parsons gave these doors a faux brois treatment, echoing the warm wood grain of the cabinetry.
   Along one wall the length of this room, a bank of windows offers unobstructed views of Sarasota Bay and the downtown skyline.The windows were placed precisely so that none of the ground below is visible – only sparkling, bluegreen water. This water-bound view, combined with the surrounding paneling, gives this space the feel of an elegant dining salon aboard the most exclusive of sailing vessels.
   Martel-Parsons chose unusual Chilean granite – a swirling mélange of blues, greens, frothy white and specks of gold – to enhance the ocean-going effect.
   The entry corridor continues beyond the kitchen-dining room, giving way to an enormous open space with a soaring peaked ceiling paneled with teak. Floors here are Brazilian cherry, and the two far walls of this high-drama living room are glass, glass and more glass, meeting at a corner point that follows the property’s point with wrap-around water views. The steel-cable rail that encloses the wrap-around deck outside this bank of sliders allows for minimum obstruction of this one-of-a-kind vista and continues the cruise ship theme of the kitchen and dining room.
   The architect gave this almost cavernous space intimacy and warmth with custom-built, squarecolumned consoles of ebony macassar and burled maple veneers. A freestanding fireplace anchors the far corner of the glass-walled room, and deep-set, high, transom windows are framed in teak.
   An adjoining open office is appointed with ebony-stained, wall-to-wall built-ins framing its own waterfront view.
   Beyond the dramatic living room, the downstairs master features an elegant barrel-vaulted ceiling and separate his-and-her bathrooms. “His” bath is intensely masculine, with chocolate-brown marble and black lacquered cabinetry. “Her” bath presented somewhat of a challenge for Martel-Parsons: “The marble in here, when the sun hit it, was very very pink.” Her solution was to have the marble tile that covered the wall and floors lightly honed. This served to cut the glary, pink shine leaving a soft, rosy patina.
   Upstairs, Martel-Parsons converted what was essentially closet and passageway into an entertainment venue with a view. She created a cherry-paneled pub with mirror-backed shelves and green and black speckled granite bar. Huge windows frame water views, and French doors lead to a rooftop deck for prime sunset viewing.
   Martel-Parsons converted a corner studio into an upstairs master.This large, bright room features views of the bay and the cloistered pool courtyard, and its woodpaneled, peaked ceiling gives it a lofty, crow’s nest ambiance. A service porch was transformed into an elegant bathroom with an exquisite sea-foam green vignette of pale swimming fish and waving sea grass, carved and glazed into the Venetian plaster. Tiny turquoise, golden and ice-blue glass tiles shimmer on lower walls like the glittering water outside.
   From its exotic façade, to the cabin-like dining room to the endless water views of the living room and the lofty enclave of the upstairs master, Martel-Parsons has managed to capture in this home a truly unique aura of romance and drama on the high seas.

Courtesy of Becky Martel Ventures
941 780-5655

Written by Connie Greco

Photography by Mark Borosch Photography