Who would have guessed that Southern heritage would play an influential role in
embellishing the beautiful bones of a classic, very New England 1903 Shingle
Style house on Massachusetts’s North Shore? But for Honey Collins, a second-generation designer who grew up in Atlanta in a world of legendary style, the
7,150-square-foot house designed in 1903 by Peabody & Stearns, a venerable
Boston architectural firm, was just the place to introduce Southern elegance.
“It’s no coincidence that the scale of Southern antiques is just right for grand
spaces,” she says.
The homeowners’ odyssey to what is now their dream house reads like
a four-star movie script. As boarding students at Brooks School in North
Andover, Massachusetts — she from Chicago, he from Italy — they were just
friends, a situation that changed to romance at their fifth class reunion in 1992.
At the time, they were earning graduate degrees, she in Boston, he in Italy.
They married in 1997 and are now parents of a young
daughter and son, as well as partners in a trans-Atlan-tic family enterprise, Tenuta Santo Pietro (tenutasanto
pietro.com), a 62-acre estate in Tuscany that features a
interior design
honey collins
interior design
