The Green House, Then and Now
This Rehoboth Beach home caught its current owner’s eye long ago
By Lynn R. Parks | Photographs by Carolyn Watson
From the April 2024 issue
When Katie Meerstein was young, her family spent summer vacations in a cottage on Pennsylvania Avenue in Rehoboth Beach, in what Meerstein and her sisters called the Purple House. On their walks to the beach, they passed what they called the Green House, a cedar-shake cottage with teal trim.
“We would notice it every time we walked by — this beautiful green house,” Meerstein remembers.
Years later, when she and her husband, Ryan, were looking for a vacation home for themselves and their three young daughters, the Green House appeared on the market. “I didn’t tell my mother and sisters that we were thinking about buying it,” she says. “I just told them that it was on the market, and asked if they remembered it. And then, before I knew it, we were owners of the house!”
That was in January 2022. Workers with Lewes-area construction firm Douglas & Company started renovations of the house five months later and completed them in May 2023. Engineering for the project was done by the Element Design Group, based in Lewes. Interior design was by Weeth Home of Rehoboth Beach.
The original cottage was built in the 1930s; the Meersteins are just the third family to own it. The renovation included installing heating — the structure had never been winterized — and air conditioning, as well as new electrical lines. But it didn’t include any expansion: the footprint of the current home is the same as the old cottage.
The front porch, originally screened in its entirety, is now in two sections. The smaller section, on the west end of the porch and including the front door, is unscreened. There, three rocking chairs, each of which can seat two people, face the street.
In the screened section, on the east end of the porch, are a sitting area and a dining area, with eight wicker chairs clustered around a rustic table. Four sets of glass doors can be pushed back into the wall to make the porch and adjoining family room one space. “When we open those doors and feel the ocean breeze throughout the house, it’s really something else,” Meerstein says.
Pine floors in the family room are original to the house, refinished to be as light as possible. The wall around the fireplace is stucco, and the mantel, a single thick board, is a reclaimed beam from the front porch.
In the kitchen and dining area, the plank ceiling is vaulted to follow the steep roofline. The floor is covered in large tiles in shades of brown, each one of which looks like it’s made up of increasingly smaller tiles, set one inside the other.
Quartz counters in the kitchen and on the island are white with blue and gold veins. On the island, the stone is installed in such a way that the veins seem to form waterfalls down the sides.
Two wicker chandeliers hang over the dining table. Between two windows behind the table is a painting, “Open Blue Curves,” by New York City artist Johnny Abrahams. “The painting is bold and simple, but beautiful and eye-catching,” Meerstein says. “That’s exactly what I want our house to be.”
A floating stairway — riser-less, so the steps seem to float in the air — is in the space between the kitchen/dining area and the front foyer. On the wall opposite it, beneath a row of windows, are cabinets, the doors covered with the same fabric that appears on pillows in the family room and screened porch.
In the foyer, “Inner Glow,” a painting of a woman underwater by Atlanta-based artist Pavlina Alea, sits on a table. “It has water, and all the perfect colors, and the blond woman; I have these three little blond girls and I love paintings that remind me of them,” Meerstein says.
Two guest bedrooms and a guest bathroom are off the foyer. Upstairs are the three bedrooms that the family uses.
After one summer in their vacation home, and looking forward to a second summer, Meerstein says she couldn’t be happier. “I feel like the house was made for us. It’s a place where all five of us can go and be comfortable.
“I love the house so much, I love the street, I love the town. I feel like my whole life has led up to us getting this house.”