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Smiling at him, I say, “All you need is the coat with the patches on the elbows, and you’ve achieved it.”
Kris takes my hand in his and pulls me back out into the foyer. He points at a door next to his office.
“In there is the downstairs bathroom.”
He keeps walking to the other side of the foyer. Again, the lights come on, and I’m taken into a living room. The couches are white with soft blue pillows on them, and the wooden floors have many plush faded-looking rugs scattered throughout the large space. The room is dominated by an enormous fireplace with a huge stone mantel.
“Oh, Kris, this is stunning.”
“You should’ve seen it when I first moved in. The previous owners had lived here for twenty years and had never done a remodel. It took nearly two years to get the house to look like this.”
“It’s so different from our home in LA.”
“Yeah, this one has a soul.”
The comment makes me smile. The home in LA is very modern, but this home feels like Boothbay—lots of wood and soft furnishings.
Kris tugs me along, and we keep walking through the living room into a dining room. The old wooden table seats ten, and the seats surrounding it are all different shapes and sizes, except for the two end chairs. They both have high backs and armrests.
“A designer helped me pick out the chairs. She said the mix-matched look would suit the house, but I insisted that at least the end chairs be the same. To be honest, even after all this time, I’m not sure I like all the different chairs.”
“It’s quirky.” I run my hand over the surface of the table. “This is beautiful.”
“It was made from a tree we had to cut down after a bug infestation. If you look carefully, you can see where they’ve eaten through some of the wood.”
Kris cocks his head to the side and pulls me further through the house and into the kitchen. It has white shaker-style cabinets with marble counters, and all the appliances are stainless steel. The kitchen is L-shaped with a small breakfast nook tucked around the corner and has the largest island I’ve ever seen.
With one hand behind his head, Kris asks, “Do you like it?”
“Like it? Kris, it’s amazing.”
He opens a cabinet door and hiding under the stairs is a butler’s pantry with another refrigerator, two more ovens, a dishwasher, and a sink.
“Wow, this is well… wow.”
Kris chuckles. “This downstairs section used to have the kitchen, dining, and living room all on the left side. The right side of the house was all bedrooms. But I wanted space to move.” He pulls me further into the pantry and opens what I thought was another cupboard. Instead, he reveals a narrow hallway. “This is between the downstairs bathroom and the breakfast nook. It leads to the outside.”
Kris leads me down the passage, opens the door at the end, and stops just on the other side. Cautiously, I poke my head out, but Lulu, whom I’d forgotten about, shoots out like a rocket. Kris holds out his hand, and I step outside, then he shows me the door. From a distance, it wouldn’t look like a door—it blends in smoothly with the wooden siding on the house.
“Why?”
Kris shrugs. “I wanted something different. Something unique.”
Lulu comes running back into the house.
“How many bedrooms are upstairs?”
Grinning, he says, “There’s only three. The master takes up the whole left side, and the right has two bedrooms that share a bathroom.”
He shuts the door, and we wind our way back through the house to the staircase. This, too, is wooden with large, intricately carved newel posts. Walking up the stairs, Kris takes me to the master bedroom. He opens the double doors and turns around, spreading his arms wide.
“Ta-da!”
Laughing, I walk into the bedroom. At one end is a king-size four-poster bed that Kris is leaning against.
“Well, what do you think?”
The floors in the upper level have been laid in a herringbone pattern, and the walls are painted a warm white. Not only is there a massive bed in the room, but there’s also a tan leather couch. The curtains are the same color blue as the pillows downstairs.
