Home Resource

It’s become almost cliché to say that someone came to the Lowcountry for a vacation and ended up staying forever, but that’s just what happened when Jim and Liz McGuffey went looking for a place to downsize.

Their decision came quickly after a visit with friends to Hilton Head Island led them to Bluffton’s Hampton Hall. This past spring, they achieved their ideal downsizing in a house that’s around half the size of their old one.

“We had lived in Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Detroit and Philadelphia, and we and some friends visited Hilton Head and fell in love with the area, especially Bluffton and a lot in Hampton Hall,” Jim said.

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Shelby Stephens and her husband, Joey Charnasky, are your classic outdoorsy Hilton Head types. So when they began building their Indigo Run home in 2010 they prioritized connecting the house with the environment.

Starting, most dramatically, with the 3,500-square-foot home’s exterior of stacked stone and heavily textured stucco, Shelby and Joey strove to incorporate elements of their favorite components of nature. “Our love of the mountains is represented in the exterior stacked stone, which we also used in the lanai’s fireplace,” Shelby said by phone from a recent hiking trip to the North Carolina mountains.

Brett and Tara Warthen’s Gascoigne Bluff Road home, Hidden Oak, is special in many ways. For its panoramic views of the May River. For its theater, swimming pool, screened-in porch, climate-controlled wine room, chef ’s kitchen (with three islands) and kids’ playhouse. For its dock on the river, and its second-floor, house-length balcony — just to name a few.

The Warthens and their son and daughter, Bryce and Kelsey, also have plenty of room to grow. The house, designed by John Pittman III and built by Casey Ricks of Baywater Properties, weighs in at a hefty 8,251 square feet, including the carriage  house, four-car garage and apartment, which Brett uses as his office.

“We call it beefy,” Tara quipped. “It’s very distinguished, and when you see it, you know it’s a John Pittman design. He has that ‘large’ signature.”

Looking for a perfect place to create an environment of stylish living? Look no further than your own backyard.

With its lush topography and magnificent (if a touch humid these days) weather, the Lowcountry is perfect for turning your outdoor spaces into extensions of your living rooms, kitchens and quiet retreats. This isn’t a new idea, of course: According to Paula S. Wallace, president of the Savannah College of Art and Design and author of “Perfect Porches,” porches in the South were historically designed to allow houses to breathe in hot weather by providing cross-ventilation and a cooling breeze. They also offered natural shade and were typically the coolest place in the house during the summer months.

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At 78 Cumberland Drive in Belfair, fun is paramount. The Bluffton home of Bob Willis and Nancy Winslow was built with an eye on entertaining and enjoying the panoramic views of nature.

The interior and furnishings of the year-and-a-half-old residence were designed by Dean Huntley of Plantation Interiors, who, early in the construction process, became part of an intimate team that worked closely with the owners and contractors.

“I assisted with the view lines, interior design, cabinets, floorings, plumbing and electrical, and then I furnished it. I was fired several times, but always with love,” Huntley joked.

Some time ago, Bluffton was known as the little town over the bridge that was hard to get to — 
you know, because of the traffic. Today, as the Lowcountry grows more interconnected 
every day, it’s become more of an understood addendum to the words “Hilton Head” or “Lowcountry.” Here are seven semi-off-the-beaten-path landmarks, locations and, well, paths that help shape 
that little town’s state of mind.

An old Sea Pines dame has been dressed up fit for a ball, and she’s ready to dance again.

But before you jump to conclusions, we’re talking about a renovated 1973 home just past the Ocean Gate on the Atlantic side in Sea Pines.

The home’s former owners were fairly early to the Sea Pines game, having purchased the choice oceanfront plot in the early ‘60s. Now, a couple from Atlanta — physicians with your typical “visited-Hilton Head-and-fell-in-love” — own the home, and after a seven-month renovation, it’s ready once again to be the belle of the ball.

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Sure, there’s plenty of golf around here, and everyone knows to stop at the Harbour Town lighthouse when in town. But if you venture off the marked trails every now and again, you’ll find that Hilton Head Island and the surrounding Lowcountry are filled with vast stores of hidden wonder, places and phenonema that don’t necessarily appear on all the tourist maps. Throughout the summer, Monthly will spotlight some of these slightly more hidden gems, without which the Lowcountry wouldn’t be the place we call home. And we’ll start right here on Hilton Head and Daufuskie.


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You need only one word to describe the great room in Don and Kim Thompson’s Palmetto Dunes home: stunning.

It’s vast and angular, full of windows, sunlight and vistas of the Palmetto Dunes Golf Course. It’s also pleasantly dominated by a European villa-style limestone fireplace.

Don and Kim Thompson purchased the 3,250-square-foot house in 2004 as a second home and rental investment. “We love Palmetto Dunes — its location, the golf course and the neighbors. It’s close to the beach,” says Don. “We found this home just down the street from where we were renting, looked at it, thought about it for about half an hour and signed the contract.

This past winter was an especially cold and dreary one for the Lowcountry, but take heart, because the payoff has finally arrived. Spring is here, the time to usher a sense of warmth and energy into your home by thinking about personal styles, 2011 trends and how you can revitalize your sanctuary with some fresh ideas and a little imagination.

Seasons change and trends come and go, but the basics of our personal style rarely shift. We all have our own ideas about what makes us feel safe, secure and healthy, and it’s important to remember that our home is our sanctuary — not a place to continually keep up with ever-changing trends, but a place where we can indulge in our personal style.

The sun is shining and the ground it’s warming; it’s time to begin laying the groundwork for your spring garden. Here are four ways to get started.

Is there anything sweeter than March in the Lowcountry? The air fills with the sweet scents of wisteria, the land begins to send out lush new growth and the nurseries brim with fresh, colorful new offerings. But March is also a busy month, one filled with a long list of planning, planting and maintenance tasks. Knowing where to start in this seemingly overwhelming “to do list” can be a great help; here’s a quick primer to get you started:

So you're already doing your part to protect the planet by bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, using low-energy light bulbs and looking for ways to reduce, reuse and recycle every day. Here are even more tips and tricks to live so “green” you’d swear it was always St. Patrick’s Day — many of which will even put some green back in your wallet.

Let the light shine bright

Next time you’re dusting, give those light bulbs a good onceover — you can coax 50 percent more light out of your bulbs just by dusting them regularly. Turn off the light, let the bulb cool down and clean with a dust-grabbing dry cloth. (And, of course, when a standard light bulb burns out, replace with an Energy Starrated bulb.)

The water views aren’t bad, of course, but there’s a bigger reason that Ernst and Christina Bruderer chose to build their home in Windmill Harbour: The area, conceived by Charles Fraser with sustainability in mind, is one of the most progressive on the island, one that enables and encourages the kind of eco-friendly construction that is the home’s hallmark.

(Photography by Butch Hirsch)

A self-proclaimed “frustrated architect” with a vision for an ecologically friendly home, Ernst Bruderer approached architect Terry Rosser and Chris VanGeison of VanGeison Construction, who had recently built an Earth Craft home in Palmetto Bluff, to help make his green vision a reality — not to be trendy, not to cut power bills, but because, as Bruderer says, “It is our responsibility.”