The kitchen replaced an uninsulated 1960s space where, in previous winters, the family donned their parkas for warmth from October to April. Taped beneath the island, unframed, are two paintings Daisy and Rip made as toddlers.
“A lot of the things are just things that we dragged from the beach, or when we visited a friend, or from the yard, or I made out of bits and bobs,” says Menocal.
Menocal’s mother, Katharine Barnwell, a classically trained decorative painter, lives with the family too. She chipped in creatively, including lending a hand on the dining room chandeliers, which Menocal designed and crafted from disposable aluminum lasagna trays. They cut the trays into leaves, flattened, bunched, and draped over utilitarian hanging lamps “like a hula skirt,” Menocal says.
The dining room was once a greenhouse, added on in the 1960s. Sunlight streams in, bringing with it the forest’s chlorophyllous glow. In a nod to the room’s past life, Menocal hand-painted white ferns over mellow, lichen-green walls. Climbing from the floor and reaching across the ceiling, they bring her dinner guests, she says, down to “insect scale.” The butler’s pantry at the far end of the dining room might be Menocal’s favorite room. It seems to be glowing too, its walls a “cheerful but mischievous” Farrow & Ball Arsenic green—“a transition in energy” between the ethereal, botanical dining room and the bright, clean kitchen.