Teahouse on the Neck, Ocean Avenue, Marblehead, Massachusetts
If you're living in a home that was built for a tea company executive and avid sailor, your decorating choices are pretty much set for you. That goes double when you own a much-photographed teahouse that's sitting prettily on a point of a peninsula.
{source}
It's unlikely that Barker ever met Lipton personally since he was only 18 when Lipton died, but they both were involved in the America's Cup yacht races that took place from New York to Marblehead. After Lipton made five unsuccessful attempts to win it, he decided he would get his name on the trophy by donating the trophy.
After Barker gained an executive position at Lipton, that cup must have stayed on his mind. He was one of the geniuses behind Lipton's Cup-a-Soup, and was also responsible for adding Wishbone Salad Dressing, Good Humor Ice Cream, and Pennsylvania Dutch Noodles to Lipton's product lines.
{1972 ad, source}
When he wasn't innovating soup products or sailing, Barker was at home in his 1880 mansion. (Numerous articles claim that it was built for him -- which is also unlikely since he wasn't born until 1913.)
He apparently named it Low Woods, a name which must have pre-dated the teahouse, because the property is now more familiarly called Teahouse on the Neck.
The foyer features a mural of the neck -- the peninsula that extends into Massachusetts bay.
It's the view of Marblehead from Salem.
Here's how the foyer appeared in 2011, thanks to a video tour given by the previous owner:
Here's the living room in 2011:
It's nice that not much has changed, because working on the house was a labor of love for those previous owners. Besides doing carpentry and painting, they installed that long cobblestone driveway by themselves!
The house has five bedrooms and six bathrooms in 6,518 square feet.
This nautical home office (nauffice?) caught my eye. Both Zillow and Pinterest keep suggesting them to me. Maybe it's a gentle hint that I should be more productive.
At any rate, if it were mine, I'd bring in more (subtle) tea and sailing references, like this:
Speaking of productive, the house also has an exercise room:
It's adjacent to the wine-tasting room, and if you're wondering why it's wine-tasting and not tea-tasting, just wait...
because one of the best parts of the house is the tea room. It's paneled in tea shipping crates from all over the world, collected by the Barker family:
It also has the original servant's phone:
I wonder if they ever ran an extension out to the teahouse?
I loved it when during the video the previous owner mentioned watching yacht races from there.
It's nice that so little has changed over the years, including the layout on this 1912 map:
{source }
The property is labeled in W. G. Barker's name -- which confuses me, because as I said, he wasn't born yet. It wasn't his father's property either, because his name was Charles and they lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. Still, there's an obvious family connection.
Mr. If It Were Mine didn't have time to make a fancy overlay map, but here's how the area looks today:
The original Barker lot was subdivided in 1991, but the original copper beech tree is still there.
All that needs to be done is to follow those decorating cues with an appropriate waterside vignette:
{Lipton's Sri Lanka tea plantation, source}
