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In the New Jersey Shore town of Spring Lake, large Victorian and Shingle Style houses sit along tree-lined streets that weave between a quaint downtown and an unspoiled beach. It is a look that hasn’t changed much since moneyed Main Line Philadelphians started making the 80-mile trek to summer there in the late 1800s.
Longtime summer residents John Kelly, 71, and Patrice Kelly, 68, who now live there full time, wanted the same grand, traditional feel for the five-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot house they built a couple blocks from the beach. But they also didn’t want it to look like every other Victorian in town.
“We wanted something that would have been here a hundred years ago but that was still unique,” said Patrice. “Handcrafted but also modern and light.”
The four-year project, finished in 2022 at a cost of around $10.5 million on a half-acre lot they bought in 2018 for $4.85 million, is a blend of Victorian and Shingle Style. The specific crossroads of those architectural styles emerged between 1870 and 1890, said James Anderson of Anderson Campanella Architects who, with his partner and wife, Felicia Campanella, designed the house. “It’s eclectic,” said Anderson. “A mixture of some of the more richly detailed Victorian woodwork with the more rustic, planar and natural Shingle style.”
The architects’ inspiration came from several well-known historic homes, including the Isaac Bell House in Newport, R.I., built in 1882 and one of the earliest examples of Shingle Style, and Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Mass., built as a summer home in 1886. They drew on the Bell house’s brickwork, iron gates and wavy wall-shingle pattern, plus the woven-wood-lattice panels and stair posts inside. Naumkeag inspired the sawtooth shingle patterns and cabinets.
The shape of the Kellys’ house is rectangular; the exterior is stone and wood. There are bay windows, rustic stone pillars, second-floor balconies with views of the ocean, a large wraparound porch and a stone tower. The woodwork, both inside and outside, is intricately carved, with sawtooth, fish scale and wavy patterns.
The cost of land is high in Spring Lake. For instance, a 75-by-150-foot lot on the beach is for sale for $4.95 million. So the Kellys decided they could get the most for their money by building a four-story house, said Patrice. That meant digging underground to put in a basement—or “lower level,” as they call it—necessitating a complicated dewatering process to remove water from the excavated site.
The design was also influenced by John’s career in insurance, which started as a summer job in the mailroom and ended as CEO and owner at the same company, a New York-based firm called Frenkel & Company, later sold to EPIC. In all of their homes, and in their lives in general, he said he always considers safety first. (The Kellys joke that one of their daughter’s college essays was titled, “My father is an insurance broker, so we never have any fun.”)
For their Jersey Shore home, John insisted on a slate roof, lightning rods, two generators and an alarm that goes off if there’s water running for more than two hours. He bought flood insurance from a private company based in London, and he put security cameras everywhere. (Patrice’s sisters once tortured John when he was in South Carolina on a golf trip by repeatedly going into the wine cellar and holding expensive bottles up to the cameras, knowing he was monitoring closely via cellphone alerts.)
Patrice’s background also influenced the design. She wrote a dissertation on the history of community gardens and spent 13 years running community gardens in Essex County, N.J. Their home has a hydroponic room on the lower level where tomatoes and kale grow under special lights, each with its own feeding system. “They’re the most expensive vegetables in New Jersey,” she jokes. There is also a generous lawn and a garden outside, creating green space on three sides of the house.
The couple, who got engaged after three months and married in 1985, raised their three children in Glenridge, N.J., where they lived for 30 years in a Mediterranean-style house. They discovered Spring Lake in the 1990s, staying at a bed-and-breakfast for a few weeks in the summers. They bought a beach house there in 2004 for $1.9 million and built a new 4,000-square-foot Victorian on the property in 2005 for summer stays.
Being so close to the beach meant dealing with flooding after storms and too much upkeep. The couple also wanted a bigger home to live in full time where their extended family would have room to stay. “Most people when they retire want a smaller house. We wanted a larger home so we’d have room to entertain,” said Patrice.
They sold their Spring Lake beach house for $4.15 million in 2021 and their Glenridge house in 2022. Though just a few blocks from the beach, their new home is on a high point and not in a flood zone, they said. Their daughter Caitlin Kelly-McKenna owns an art gallery in town, and her 2 ½-year-old daughter loves to swim in her grandparents’ pool and read books in the tower. “This is the house my mom always wanted to build,” said Kelly-McKenna.
In 2008, the Kellys managed to get off the wait list and into the Spring Lake Golf Club. The financial crisis that year helped them move up the list, which they’d been on for two years, John said. There are currently no openings at the golf club—not even a wait list—for new members, and no one has joined for years, he said.
John said they love the quaintness and the history of Spring Lake. But living in a community that’s so multigenerational means they are still considered newcomers. “We’re newbies, even after 15 years,” he said.
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