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"View Slideshow\n\nHerman Melville, in Moby-Dick, imagines a Nantucket sailor at sea: \"With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.\"\n\nBlake placed an antique blanket chest at the foot of a vintage painted wrought iron bed in the master bedroom.\n\nNo longer the major whaling port it was in Melville's day, Nantucket retains the nickname given to her by early sailors\u2014\"the Gray Lady of the Sea\"\u2014because of the fog banks that roll in and enshroud the tiny island in minutes. Gray, too, are the weather-beaten shingles on Nantucket houses, the look of the barren island in winter, the herring gulls that wheel and call in all seasons. There is, however, nothing gray about the house built recently on the island's north shore by a couple from Los Angeles, Gary and Healy Cosay. Situated above the dunes, with windows on all sides, the house \"feels open and airy, even on dark days,\" says Healy Cosay.\n\nShe and her husband, a founder of Hollywood's United Talent Agency, began renting summer houses on Nantucket in the early 1980s. \"As soon as my foot hit the tarmac when we got off the plane the first time,\" she recalls, \"I thought, This is home. We'd been looking for property there ever since.\" They wanted raw land on which they could build\u2014and they found it in the summer of 2000: three acres, densely covered in scrub oaks, bayberries and wild roses, on Nantucket Sound. The plot slopes down to the beach, with conservation land on three sides.\n\nNestled into a gentle slope, the residence sits on several acres of land and looks out onto a path leading to the dunes and the beach.\n\nAfter interviewing several designers, Healy Cosay recognized the sensibility she wanted when she saw a Nantucket house with interiors by Karin Blake (see Architectural Digest, June 2002): the feel of the old\u2014aged-wood panels, antique beams, used-brick fire surrounds, American folk art\u2014with all the comforts of the new. \"I called Gary and said, This is it!'\" she reports. \"He knows and trusts my taste.\" As soon as she got back to Los Angeles, she phoned Blake\u2014who conveniently lives in Malibu\u2014and proceeded to hire her and the team Blake had worked with on the other house: William McGuire and Steve Theroux, of Nantucket Architecture Group; and the landscape architect David Troast, of Ernst Land Design.\n\nThe architects set the house into the slope near the highest point of the lot. McGuire and Theroux's handsome three-story gambrel-roofed structure is huge\u201411,000 square feet, with 24 rooms\u2014but you only see its full size, with the lower story, from the beach (north) side of the house or from a boat far out on the sound. In the front, a long driveway winds through evergreens and David Troast's mix of native grasses to what looks like a wide two-story residence with a traditional widow's walk. Above the house, Troast built retaining walls of Pennsylvania fieldstone to support the cuts in the hillside, and his granite-slab steps take you down to the front door.\n\nFor the dramatic entrance hall, Karin Blake designed a nine-foot bench and found a local artist to stencil a diamond pattern on the wide-plank pine floor. \" In many ways,\" reflects Blake, \" this is an old-fashioned house organized around a traditional central hall. You don't feel how large it is, since the individual spaces are intimate.\" The entrance hall leads to the living room, where aged wood, old brick, vintage ticking and choice antique pieces articulate the style that had prompted Healy Cosay to call Karin Blake. French doors flanking the living room fireplace open into a dining room that feels like a sun porch, with walls of windows\u2014and views of the sound\u2014on three sides. The barnlike kitchen, with a soaring double-height ceiling and its own fireplace and outdoor deck, spectacularly combines the antique and the modern: a Shaker-style chandelier and industrial lighting; old-wood cabinets and stainless-steel appliances; more stenciled diamonds on wide-plank floors.\n\nDownstairs, the stylish lower floor, with banks of windows facing the water, has a large guest room and bath, a patio, gym, steam shower, wine cellar, wine-tasting room, Healy Cosay's office and a fully equipped home theater with rear-projection screens and a sound system that works throughout the house. \" When I'm there alone,\" says Cosay, \" I can have Madama Butterfly playing in every room.\"\n\nOpera resounds in the master suite, which occupies the house's entire top floor. The bedroom, simply decorated with an Amish Center Diamond quilt, a vintage braided rug and an antique white blanket chest, is in its own gambrel-roofed wing, with windows on three sides looking out at the sound. Taking up the remainder of the floor, says Blake, \" are big, big master baths (his and hers), big, big walk-in closets (his and hers)\u2014and a large room off her closet just for Christmas decorations: Healy loves holidays!\"\n\nOutside, Troast kept the plantings natural and simple (bayberries, rugosa roses, cranberry leaf viburnum, potentilla\u2014plus an herb garden off the kitchen). Just below the house he created a lovely circular dining patio with irregular bluestone flagging and a Pennsylvania fieldstone fireplace and walls.\n\nWhen Healy Cosay brought her husband to see the finished house, all he could say was, \" Oh, my God!\" He has an office on the main floor, where he plans to write, and the couple will move to Nantucket full time this summer. \" We're not using the R word\" \u2014retire\u2014Healy Cosay says with a laugh. \" We're starting a new chapter of our lives here.\" Although the Cosays may not be able to summon up Melville's walruses and whales, they will experience firsthand all the moods, sunsets, storms, fogs and glories of the Gray Lady of the Sea."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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