Father-Daughter Renovation and Design Team Take on Remsenburg Remodel

Growing up in Westhampton with a father who has a construction company, Anne Calder, by her own telling, was not hands-on when it came to her father’s business. But being around the trade left an impression on her and may have influenced her decision to become an interior designer.

Now, after several years of working in interior design, Anne has teamed up with her father, John Calder, on a renovation of a Remsenburg home in a partnership that may become the first of many father-daughter collaborations between the pair.

John has lived in Westhampton for 40 years and has run his small company there just as long, completing hundreds of renovations, remodels and additions in Westhampton Beach and Remsenburg in that time. Anne is a 2007 graduate of Westhampton Beach High School and now resides in Brooklyn.

Their task was a first-floor renovation of a Remsenburg home fronting Moriches Bay, including a kitchen, dining room, den, master bathroom and powder room. It’s a house and clients John already knew well.

“Most of our customers are people who we’ve known — for 20 or 30 years we’ve been working with them,” John said of his eponymous business. “They trust us, and so when we need some design and decorating help, they trust me to bring my daughter and partner onto the project.”

The Remsenburg clients had the house for 20 years, hadn’t updated the kitchen and found there was much in the house that “really didn’t feel like them,” Anne said.

“It was very dark,” she added. “And the design that was in there before, it was really beautiful, but it felt kind of shadowy, like you had to turn on every single light.”

She said the colors were dark, dramatic and beautiful — but did not give summer beach weekend vibes.

During the renovation, the layout did not change much, but still there were many decisions to make in terms of materials and how she could make the home feel less dark and more personal to the homeowners, Anne said.

“I picked all the materials and thought through what kind of vibe they would prefer,” she said. “And it’s so many decisions, and it’s really hard to do. You can do it, but it’s super stressful.

“I’ve done it a whole bunch of times,” she continued. “I can narrow down 100 choices to six choices, and then getting from six choices to one choice is a lot easier. And it’s nice to have somebody on your side, I think, who can help you talk it all through.”

She met with the client several times at multiple showrooms to select the materials and ensure they work together.

The master bathroom steam shower had been enclosed and felt like a dark cave inside, Anne said. She opened it up and replaced the tile. The master bathroom now has a new quartz countertop, a large-format ceramic tile floor and mosaic accents on both the shower wall and floor. It’s warm gray and a serene space, Anne said.

The pale blue powder room has marble-looking blue nanoglass tile. “It’s like a fun twist on a traditional material and super sleek,” she said.

The powder room is attached to the living room, which shares a pale blue theme, so it feels connected, but the powder room is more modern and feels airy, she explained.

The new kitchen countertop is quartzite, and the backsplash includes some brushed gold foil.

“The client was into the element of surprise,” Anne said of the gold. She added that the home’s updated design includes some unexpected elements but nothing over the top, to keep the design flowing.

The Calders are happy with the outcome, as are the clients, Anne reported.

“They’re very happy,” she said. “They’ve sent us multiple notes saying how delighted they are. Every time they walk into the house, they can’t believe it’s theirs.”

Anne said she has long had an interest in interior design, but she felt it was for artists. She earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies with a concentration in architecture and urbanism at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but a few years later, she decided she would pursue interior design despite her prior doubts, and she earned an associate degree in interior design from a New Orleans community college.

She said she had figured “maybe I should just try the thing that I’ve always wanted to do, and if it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t go well. But at least I know I’ve tried.”

Just one semester into the interior design program, it was settled: “This is the way that my brain works,” she recalled feeling. “This makes sense for me.”

After she finished her studies in 2017, she moved to Brooklyn. She continued to work remotely for a small design firm she had begun working with in New Orleans, but she wanted to be able to walk through the spaces she was designing and be hands-on, which she finds more rewarding. So she started her own firm last year.

Working together for the first time, Anne and John found it easier than working with a contractor who they don’t have a long history with.

Anne said there is a worry about damaging the relationship with contractors when bringing up something they did wrong.

“We didn’t have any of that to worry about because I already know his limits,” she said of working with her father. “He knows my limits. I know he’s going to do a good job. And so there’s freedom to ask any question, send way too many text messages without damaging the relationship.”

John said in this situation, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, as opposed to situations where the designer and contractor are adversaries, with each trying to prove who is smarter.

“When you’re working with a daughter, you are much more conscious of that person’s identity and emotions, and you are more patient and understanding with a member of your family than you would be working with just a total stranger,” John said. “So, I think from both directions, we listened more, we were interested in compromising more. There was much less a battle of egos than you often have on jobs where people are trying to make an imprint with their own opinion, and it was much more collaborative when we decided that the finished product was going to belong to both of us and we were going to share the credit for the work instead of just trying to take the credit individually. …

“This was much more of a collaborative effort than I’ve had before. We really wanted to work together so the project would be a success for everyone involved.”

Anne said that although she was never hands-on with her father’s projects, she was often present.

“There was a whole year where after school he picked me up and just brought me back to his job, and I would sit in the truck and do my homework, or we’d be on our way home from someplace and it was like, ‘Oh, hold on, we got to check a job site.’ And so I’d be like 9 years old walking through this job site making sure that the painter did a good job,” she said.

She also occasionally held on to the end of a long piece of lumber while her father cut it to size.

“I’m more comfortable with a chop saw than my friends are,” she said.

Anne remembers her father taking her on historic home tours and pointing out the structural elements in architecture and what their purpose is. “It gives you a little bit of an advantage if you’ve had that steady drip of information into your brain for your whole life,” she said.

“She really had 20 years of experience already just by hanging around her father’s jobs,” John said.