After over a decade of regular trips to Asbury Park, New Jersey, Nicole and Charles Paloux decided to put down roots in the coastal town. Years of crashing with friends had already earned them a warm welcome into the local community, so it was finally time to cement their rightful place within it. All they needed was a prime lakefront property to make their own.
The couple’s dream vacation home, a 1916 bungalow on the water, was put on the market in July 2018 while they were visiting family in France. Although they couldn’t go to see the property in person, Nicole and Charles knew it was the one, so they worked quickly to secure it from halfway across the world. “These houses on the lake are a very hot commodity,” explains Nicole, founder of the PR firm Red Balloon Communications. “It’s a really special neighborhood. We put in an offer well over asking—we knew it was going to be very competitive—and we wrote a letter about how important this area had become to us. The next day, we did a FaceTime walkthrough with our realtor and we bought it, site unseen.”
While the bones of the house were solid, a full renovation was required to meet Nicole and Charles’s expectations. For the exterior, they added board-and-batten siding in Onyx by Benjamin Moore, with a black metal standing seam roof to match. Then the couple hired Refugia Design to sow their land with low-maintenance native plants that offer a lush, jungle-like vibe.