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When “Carrie Underwood” and “Reba McEntire” nearly fought each other to death, Ariel Ashe got a crash course in poultry relations. Despite being told she was buying four hens and a rooster for her Martha’s Vineyard summer home, the warring divas ended up being two of three Wyandotte-Red Star roosters and had to be re-homed. Meanwhile, the novice chicken owner, one half of the AD100 design team Ashe Leandro, was more happily settling into her own new home, a modern interpretation of a classic New England farmhouse in Chilmark, designed by Ashe and her business partner, Reinaldo Leandro.
After buying a condemned Cape house nestled among sheep and goat farms on the Atlantic Ocean in 2017, Ashe spent two years daydreaming about what she would build on the small, sloping plot. During that time she also met her future husband, filmmaker Zach Heinzerling, and the couple had a daughter, Agnes, who was born in April 2019, the same month that they finally broke ground on the new residence. “I was a little bit terrified,” Leandro admits of designing the house. “Because it was for someone so close to me, I really wanted to nail it—and I think we did.” Ashe’s two new roommates dictated some layout decisions, like using the basement as a screening room where Heinzerling edits his films and placing Agnes’s room close to that of her parents. But the designer—whose 14-year-old firm has become one of the country’s most in-demand, with clients including Seth Meyers (her brother-in-law), Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, and Jake Gyllenhaal—had strong inclinations about the house she wanted.
“While the exterior is very clearly in the New England vernacular,” says Leandro, who studied architecture in his native Caracas and New York City, and concedes that the local style is not one he is very fluent in, “we had a bit more freedom to explore in the interior.” In a nod to its setting, the house’s guest wing and entry are paneled in shiplap, and the stairwell is illuminated with lantern sconces. One guest suite, however, is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Santorini Blue, a choice inspired by a house in Patmos, where Leandro vacationed one summer, and the kitchen’s concrete Moroccan tiles, sourced by Ashe’s Marrakech rug dealer, are meant to evoke an Italian cucina where eventual citrus and oil stains will only add character. “Because it was finished during COVID, I felt like we’d never be able to travel again, and I really wanted the rooms to take you away,” explains Ashe. “Even though Martha’s Vineyard is a vacation spot in its own right, you can’t beat a rental house in Patmos filled with 20 different blues, or an old Italian farmhouse with thick plaster walls surrounded by olive trees.”
Of course, the minute you want to be back on the Vineyard you need only step out onto the 1,000-square-foot porch to catch a glimpse of the ocean beyond the rolling sheep pastures studded with oak and beetlebung trees.
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