Veranda Magazine

Nothing is perfect and everything is perfect in nature, as the saying goes. Architect Jeffrey Dungan came face-to-face with this duality when a couple approached him to design a second home for their young family on Lake Norman in North Carolina. The perfect: a serene waterfront property protected by trees. The imperfect: a long, narrow lot with several pinch points, whose shape Dungan likens to “a gerrymandered voting district.” Yet he accepted the geometric challenge.

As VERANDA editor, I spend a lot of time looking at beautiful kitchens with innovative features. But as I was editing a feature on Ginny Collett’s jewel box of a Palm Beach home, I noticed something distinctly different about her cooktop (pictured above).

When narrowing down the paint plan for a recent project, Manhattan-based designer Elizabeth Lawrence requested no less than 85 samples to test on site, including lots of fun colors—the client works in the art world, a professional color lover—and a smattering of neutrals. “The contractor, who is lovely, said, ‘But there are so many different white trims,’” Lawrence recalls.

In 1615, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi—the Fountain of the Four Rivers—was unveiled on the Piazza Navona in Rome. Designed by renowned sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, it features four godlike male figures representing the Danube, Ganges, Nile, and Río de la Plata, each converging in one of the world’s most iconic cities. In the fall of 2025, I found myself there, gazing up at them.

My grandmother taught me how to run a house that exuded love and encouraged joy. Every time I walked through her door, I was met with a reassuring hug and a whiff of something delicious wafting from the kitchen. Her walk-in pantry had a pull-chain light and inventory lined up like a grocery store: coffee from San Francisco, salted ham from Virginia, the best Cokes (from Mexico).

A stately English manor and Star Wars may not seem to have much in common. That changed when two former set builders bought Caisson House, the 1815 headquarters of Somerset Coal Canal Company. For Phil and Amanda Honey, the move from London to this valley south of Bath marked a return to their bucolic roots. “I grew up a 10-minute walk away. I used to play on these grounds,” Phil says. Clive Nichols A stone path leads to the kitchen garden’s mix of vegetables, nasturtiums, sweet peas, and dahlias.

Janet Mavec remembers her first visit to her then-boyfriend’s property in rural New Jersey. The historic farm, once the home of the publisher of the Nancy Drew series, seduced her with its rolling hills and meandering paths, and its vast but disorderly gardens (or what could be gardens), all hugged by dense woodlands. “If you ever need any help here …” Mavec told him, swooning over not just the grounds but their outdoorsy owner, now her husband.

Islands restore us.In an age of overwhelm, they have an uncanny ability to clarify and simplify life: Whatever is left behind on the mainland fades, and the journey across water can feel like a small act of liberation. When a Boston-based couple acquired a speck of an island on a New Hampshire lake, they were looking for just such an escape.

Ian Kitson grew up in the countryside north of London—land of undulating hills and upland meadows—where he and his partner, Julie Toll, would venture on weekend breaks from their busy garden design business in the city. On one outing, they happened upon a circa-1680 farmhouse, with crumbling dry stone walls and bountiful wildflower meadows, up for sale. “We fell in love,” Kitson says.

“We are never going to get this chance again,” thought Jane-Ann Walton when she saw the old farmhouse tucked away on an unpaved road in her native Norfolk. Walton had grown up gardening nearby and had just finished planting new flowerbeds at the home she shared with her husband, “so I wasn’t eager to move,” she says. But the couple recognized a gem when they saw it. The property had a pond, the remains of an old moat, and vistas stretching into the surrounding forests.