Ah, Nantucket

There’s a place in my imagination that I know so well. Its vast expanse of hard-packed beach is fringed with dune grasses. Separating beach from dune is an old fence: skinny sticks of weather-beaten cedar (maybe from an ancient fishing boat?) strung together with wire. Half-buried in places by windswept sand and random clumps of wild roses, it’s not so much constructed as draped, like the tail of a kite taken down by the wind.

Just beyond the fence, on a rise overlooking the sea, is a large Victorian house, shingled in unpainted gray cedar with whitewashed trim. Its wooden floors are polished to a rich patina, helped along, I imagine, by generations of bare summer feet. It has high ceilings and delightfully odd-shaped rooms. 

It has gables and a wide porch and old-fashioned windows made to fling open to catch the sea breezes. A thick green carpet of lawn rolls gently down to the harbor where sailboats are flitting past a pretty red and white lighthouse.

Behind the house is a sea of rugged moors and, nearby, a charming village with rose-covered cottages tucked into narrow lanes. I imagine a weathered rowboat or two, washed up among some reeds, forgotten. I can see children raking the sand for clams, and grownups gathered around wooden tables piled with seafood baskets and vases of summer hydrangeas. I imagine the distant wail of a ship’s foghorn.

I don’t know where all this came from. My best guess is a picture book I loved as a child, with a healthy infusion of the Emily Brontë novel, Wuthering Heights, and perhaps a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Last summer, purely by accident, I stumbled across my imagined place, or rather a composite of it. The house was just as I pictured; so were the storybook cottages and rose trellises, the windblown fences, the hydrangeas and even the abandoned boat.

This place, as maybe you guessed, is the small island of Nantucket. Not so much the island’s biggest town, also named Nantucket, but a collage of the island’s parts.

Nantucket town is in many ways a sister to Naples. The arts and shopping district of this famed seaside resort destination swells to several times its population during the July-to-August “season.” Excellent museums, upscale boutiques and restaurants are tucked into and among sea captains’ houses and historic buildings, sharing the landscape with ice cream and souvenir shops.

The harborfront itself is an objet d’art, with its faded wharf buildings leaning into each other, heavy with flower boxes and hanging baskets. This is exactly why so many day-trippers catch the morning ferry in from Hyannis (Cape Cod), spend the entire day strolling around historic Nantucket town and then hop the last ferry out without ever leaving the harbor area. This, in fact, is what we almost do.

Originally, the two-part focus of our long, lazy weekend was: 1) great quantities of the island’s famous clam chowder, and 2) Capt. Blair Perkins’ whaleboat. The clam chowder part is easy, but we can’t agree on whether to take the whale-watching excursion or the cruise to a remote island to see a colony of gray seals. So we book both days, back to back.

What we didn’t expect were the rough seas that postponed our whale trip by a day, combined with the serendipitous opportunity to ride along with Ryan Grant, director of hospitality for Nantucket Island Resorts, as he gave a new employee a driving tour of the island.

Who knew that the 18th-century whaling capital of the world, with its picturesque wharves and art colony, also has rugged moors and heathlands right out of a Brontë novel? Not to mention cranberry bogs, sheer cliffs and a remote, 1,100-acre wildlife refuge accessible primarily by foot or boat.

So it is that I found the tiny vine-covered cottages of my imagination, perched on the edge of a cliff in the village of ’Sconset. (Technically it’s Siasconset, but only outsiders call it that.)

Once an actor’s colony on the island’s southeastern shore, it consists mainly of a charming café (and package store), a miniature post office and a grocery market/deli/bakery/general store.

A narrow road connects even narrower lanes named for berries, birds and pretty ladies of the past century. There, the cottages—some of them seaside shanties dating back to the 1700s—are clad in unpainted gray cedar with white trim. There are white picket fences and rose trellises, including my favorite one, which drapes over the roof and covers the entire cottage.

Lobster traps, buoys, clam rakes and other necessities of seaside village life add ambiance to the minuscule gardens. I’m charmed to see a pockmarked wooden picnic table, perfect for my platter of lobsters and vase of fresh-cut hydrangeas. A steep path leads down to the beach, and there is my fence in the dunes. Seals bob in the waves near the shoreline as frothy breakers crash onto the hard-packed golden sand. 

As for my grand-scale house on the hill, there are actually two: The Wauwinet at the end of a winding road on the northeast shore, and the White Elephant in Nantucket Town at the nautical entry point to the island.

The Wauwinet lies at the gateway to the untamed Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, between the wild Atlantic Ocean and the northern tip of Nantucket Harbor. Technically not a house at all, it is a gracious seaside inn dating back to the mid 1800s. Once, it fell into ruin and spent years vacant and forlorn, until a woman named Jill Karp (who must have had my same dream) acquired it with her husband, Stephen. Mrs. Karp spent several years transforming it, and today it’s among the most acclaimed small hotels in the world. The Wauwinet is everything I imagined, with added bonuses such as Pratesi linens, fresh flowers from the gardens and artful amenities that one would expect from a Relais & Chateau hotel, which it now is. All 32 rooms, each unique, are pretty much perfect. For sheer romance, my personal recommendations are dormer rooms 302 and 303.