TRURO — The afternoon that restaurateur Gary Sullivan and his husband Mark Young first saw the run-down seaside cottage, it was anything but love at first sight. For years, the pair had searched for the ideal retreat in Provincetown, Mass. Eventually defeated by low inventory and high prices, they started the search in neighboring Truro.
Their beleaguered real estate agent brought them to a decaying cluster of petite cabins that were once used as weekly rentals. The first cabin they looked at, which was the newest and nicest, was outside their price range.
The second cabin was within their budget but decidedly not the sort of place they envisioned spending leisurely summer weekends entertaining friends. It was tiny, dark, and depressing.
“There was an old lady sitting out in front of the cottage with a can of Schlitz in her hand,” says Young. “There was laundry hanging on the line. There was a broken concrete patio. We left. We didn’t even look at it.”
But there was something about the 500-square-foot cottage — be it the surprisingly well-designed floor plan or the couple’s pure desperation to find a vacation home — that drew them back. A year later, after the asking price of the house rose by $40,000, they became the owners of a dilapidated, former motel cabin. But Sullivan, who co-owns the new Boston eatery Rocca and is a partner in the Sapphire Restaurant Group, and Young, a real estate trust attorney, could see the possibilities.
They set about transforming the linoleum-floored cabin into a relaxing retreat. One look around their tranquil living room, with its cathedral ceilings and porcelain tile floors, and it’s difficult to believe the immaculate space was once adorned with pineapple-print wallpaper.
“I remember thinking, that in addition to being depressing, the cottage was too far from Provincetown,” Sullivan says while preparing a lunch of couscous with mint, tomato, and feta in the cabin’s small kitchen. “We wanted to be near the center of everything and all our friends.”
Six years after buying the Truro home, the couple is finally able to see its advantages. They are a 10-minute bike ride from friends and the carnival atmosphere of Provincetown’s Commercial Street. But they enjoy being able to escape from the action back to the quiet of Truro.
The limited size of the cottage has also proven to be advantageous.
Instead of spending their weekends doing chores and maintenance projects on a full-size home, they are, if only for the weekend, men of leisure.
“A year ago, we started looking at a 1,600-square-foot home that was three bedrooms and three baths located right on the water,” Sullivan says. “We seriously looked at it. But everything about this place right now is manageable for us, and we couldn’t find the benefit in having more space. It would mean more entertaining.”
Their change in attitude toward the cottage is a result of the transformation the space has undergone. The only original parts of the house remaining are the frame and walls. Sullivan, who has a degree in architecture, decided in the first year that the space needed more light.
They immediately removed the rusting metal front door and tiny front window and replaced them with a 12-foot French door that opened onto a newly-built deck.
The fussy wallpaper was stripped, walls were temporarily painted and the curling linoleum floor was covered with area rugs. It was enough maintenance to get them through their first summer. After that season, the real work began. A contractor gutted the interior down to the studs and began rebuilding the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. Larger windows were installed in every room to take advantage of the lavender, blue, and orange light reflected off the ocean at different times of the day.
While many of their neighbors added sleeping lofts, Sullivan and Young skipped the loft and took the ceilings up to the beams, giving them nearly 12-foot ceilings that create the illusion of space. The shower, which Young describes as “a scary, little round stall,” was removed, and in its place an open tile shower was installed. The renovated bathroom also includes one of the couple’s splurges — Italian glass tiles.
“I found it at Waterworks in Boston, and it was perfect,” says Sullivan. “It brought a sea glass element into the space. I set up the pattern using three different sizes of tiles. Unfortunately, I made a mistake in my math, and it ended up costing twice as much as I thought it would. That was a rough day with Mark.”
The two men, who have known each other 22 years and have been married for nearly three, have been able to use their very different talents to make these improvements successful. Sullivan chooses colors and is able to envision how a completed project will look. He picked soft, summery blues and greens for the walls and designed the new kitchen with the maple cabinets and frosted glass. Young is the more practical and handy of the two. Although Sullivan can pick just the right sofa, he is useless at assembling a grill. And while Young can assemble the grill, he doesn’t have Sullivan’s knack for visualizing a room.
The limited space of the Truro cabin has also taught the pair a new style of entertaining. At Rocca, the recently-opened Italian restaurant in the South End, Sullivan is accustomed to hosting hundreds of customers a night.
In Truro, he and Young are slightly more limited. Dinner parties tend to consist of one or two other couples at the picnic table on their front deck. On nights when it rains, they either gather at the round West Elm table just off the kitchen, or balance plates on their laps in the living room.
“It’s much more simple than our life in Boston, I think that’s the appeal,” says Sullivan, with pugs Ella and Sofie at his side. “We both have very busy schedules, and here we can connect with each other and our friends. It’s really become an important escape for us.”
Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com.
