Smart (Yet Fun!)
Practicality and whimsy commingle in this South Bethany home
By Lynn R. Parks | Photographs by Carolyn Watson
From the April 2023 issue
In the 35 years they’ve been married, Eric and Stephanie Compton have moved 14 times. “We’ve lived in some houses that just didn’t work right,” Stephanie says.
That’s not the case with Casa del Mar, their South Bethany home, completed in August 2020. Based on their experiences with good and bad houses, the Comptons were able to tell builder Marnie Custom Homes, of Bethany Beach, and Annapolis-based Purple Cherry Architects exactly what they wanted.
Vinyl floors, for example. “With a dog, sand and water, I wasn’t going to do wood floors,” Stephanie says. And a big kitchen, with windows rather than upper cabinets on the sink wall (an attached pantry provides storage space) and an oversized island, 15 feet long and uncluttered on its top by a sink or stove. “We wanted an island big enough so that everyone could have a seat,” Eric says.
They also wanted a small wine bar, where Stephanie keeps novelty glasses that she’s collected from states in which she and Eric have lived, and a special spot for a sculpture of a mythical jackalope made from driftwood by Stephanie’s sister, Sarah McMullen of Alexandria, Va. “He greets you as you walk in the master suite,” Stephanie says.
And then there’s the ground-floor tequila bar, the design of which Eric based on La Cava del Tequila in the Mexico pavilion at EPCOT in Florida. On display there is Eric’s collection of tequila bottles, illuminated by shelf lighting that can be set to one color or a changing pattern of colors. “The lights point up at the bottles, so the bottles can be red, green, pink, white, whatever,” says Eric (aka DJ Agave — at least a few times during the summer, in a couple of area bars).
Before building their home, the Comptons had a South Bethany residence on Petherton Drive. “It was the perfect beach house, built in the 1960s, with tiny closets and a spiral staircase,” Stephanie recalls. “But it wasn’t a place you could retire in.”
They bought a vacant lot at the corner of two canals in 2017 and construction started a year later. While they still go back and forth to their home in Media, Pa., — Eric is an “executive-in-residence,” or adviser, at the Villanova University School of Business — they intend to retire to South Bethany.
Eric describes their beach home as a “combination of smart and fun.” The smart part includes the main floor primary suite, which can be shut off from the rest of the house and that has its own laundry room. Low-voltage runner lights mounted on the bedroom floor guide sleepy walkers to the bathroom.
Other smart decisions, he says, were the inclusion of a garage door on the back of the house, so that patio furniture and kayaks don’t have to be dragged around to the front to be put away, and a ground-floor laundry room where people returning from the beach can leave their towels.
Fun aspects include coat hooks in the main foyer that are shaped like the back end of a dog (tail included), a shuffleboard court and video games in the same room as the tequila bar, and a third-story “guitar room,” with displays of music memorabilia Eric has collected. An earlier career in the health technology field brought him into contact with “B.B. King, Sheryl Crow, Chris Isaak and Jose Feliciano, and they’ve given me albums, or guitars, or microphones,” he says. “We display all of that in there, as well as the Bruce Springsteen guitar my wife gave me, the ticket to my first Springsteen concert, back in 1981, and our latest one, from 2012.” Eric changes his display of albums according to the season, or to the tastes of people who are visiting.
Despite those fun features, Eric says that in planning their home, he and Stephanie “really thought about the livability of the place, rather than the showiness of the place.” In designing a home, “you’ve got to remember that you’re going to be living there,” he advises. “I think that we have a lot of cool stuff. But we don’t have impractical showy things.”