The authors of novels set in summery, coastal communities describe why shoreside homes are such a staple of fiction, and how they design ones that feel real.
Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.
It’s a sign of summer as sure as longer days and warmer weather: the sudden proliferation of beach reads at the entrance of your local bookstore and neighborhood library. That term can mean many things, but often it’s quite literal, indicating summer-set tales with colorful, eye-catching covers featuring dazzling stretches of sand, inviting umbrellas and Adirondack chairs, and patches of tall grass you can practically hear shushing in the ocean breeze.
And, of course, beach houses.
The beach house is a mainstay of fiction, a trope that cuts across audience age and genre: young adult, romance, women’s fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, and even the occasional James Patterson thriller all find themselves set in and around them. It’s not a new development, either; paperback bestsellers in the space have been around for decades, like Judy Blume’s 1977 Summer Sisters, set on Martha’s Vineyard, and Iris Rainer Dart’s 1985 Beaches, the source material for the tear-jerker classic movie starring Bette Midler. But the trend has surely been supercharged in recent years by the success of Elin Hildebrand’s Nantucket-set oeuvre and Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, now a wildly successful Amazon show.
"The house was large and gray and white, and it looked like most every other house on the road, but better," says Belly, the protagonist of The Summer I Turned Pretty. "It looked just the way I thought a beach house should look. It looked like home." These settings often serve as a way to tell stories about family—but they lean into the messiness, acknowledging the fact that home is always just a little bit complicated.
Indeed, one of the reasons beach houses are such a staple of fiction is that the setting meets perhaps the number-one requirement for a powerful trope: it offers both familiarity and variety. Every coastal community has its own architecture and its own rhythm, and "the beach" encompasses everything from rutted dirt roads to the Kennedy compound on Hyannis Port. But there are common characteristics from book to book: The fictional beach house isn’t so pristine that you can’t track at least a little sand in on the floor. A perusal of bookstores and library shelves suggest New England and the Outer Banks seem to be particularly popular settings, although California, the Maritimes, and even the Great Lakes do make appearances. Locales like the Gulf Coast are less thoroughly represented: the predominant vibe is less rattan decor, foldable chaise loungers, and button-down fishing shirts, more cedar shake siding, Adirondack chairs, the occasional rollneck sweater, and, of course, enormous clouds of blue hydrangeas.
When author Meg Mitchell Moore was mentally designing the beach house at the center of her new novel, Down With the Shipmans, she knew her location: Jenness Beach in Rye, New Hampshire, which she’d visited previously. She knew the general style of structure in the area—low to the ground, right on the beach—and she knew she wanted a house that had started out as a relatively modest 1960s cottage and grown over the years. So she did some research at the local historical society, chatted with an architect about considerations like zoning laws, and peeked at vacation listings. She knew she definitely needed a distinct outside: "That was super important, because a lot of those homes have a patio, and I had a lot of scenes that are taking place out on the patio."
The result is well-loved and just a little bit ramshackle, with a sunroom full of old board games and a garage full of junk. It’s a house that’s, as she writes, been "expanded, renovated, insulated, shored up," and it’s "decorated in what might optimistically be called ‘cozy chic’ but more accurately ‘jury-rigged haute.’ Rattan baskets hold magazines, throw blankets, the odd doll or toy…. The kitchen, redone fifteen years ago, has the white cabinets and black granite countertops of the time, after white became the new brown but before gray became the new white."
Often, these houses aren’t particularly new, lavish, or large. In The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly sleeps in their host’s childhood bedroom, with faded calico wallpaper and white furniture; "Everything about my room was old and faded, but I loved that about it. It felt like there might be secrets in the walls, in the four-poster bed, especially in that music box." A sense of ease carries through into the Amazon adaptation: "It isn’t pretentious but rather warm and welcoming. It is the kind of place where you can walk in from the beach and put your sandy feet on the coffee table," Season One set designer Beth Robinson told House Beautiful.
Catherine Newman’s 2024 novel Sandwich tracks one family’s week on Cape Cod, crammed into a rental they’ve returned to for many years. Our introduction to the cottage is particularly frank about the particularities of coastal architecture: We meet narrator Rocky as she’s hovering over her husband, who is plunging the toilet, part of a long-running battle with the ancient septic system. That house is based on one Newman and her family rented for 25 years: "When we rented it, its main boast on VRBO was ‘architect designed,’" she recalls. "That was its main flex. And we were like, who else would have designed it? What kind of a flex is that?" And so rather mentally designing a house from scratch, she took notes for years, thinking she’d like to write about the Cape at some point.
"I just wrote down every quirky thing and every archetypal thing," Newman explains. "The things that are like, oh everybody has this experience at a beach house, and then the really quirky things that were our particular experience that would evoke other people’s quirky experiences anyway. Even if your house that you rent doesn’t smell like mice and coffee, you’ll know what I mean." She gathered up details and experiences: a Scandinavian bowl decorated with enamel mushrooms, a memorably rickety bamboo coffee table, sand all over the floors, wet towels everywhere, the outdoor shower, the beach roses, the troublesome septic system.
The more frustrating aspects, in fact, become tools in the writer’s hands. "If you’re in a classic Cape Cod beach house, there’s going to be a moment where you’re in the outdoor shower, and the sun’s going to be on your face and the sky’s going to be blue and you’re going to smell the beach roses and it’s going to be this sublime experience, and then a minute later you’re going to realize that your grandchild has snapped her foot in a mouse trap because the house is infested with rodents," says Newman. "That kind of up and down, that’s probably what you’re already doing in the story, and so the beach house is going to be a character in the story, and sometimes it’s going to be amazing and sometimes it’s going to be totally constraining."
The fictional beach house is a treasured hand-me-down with a few dings and a bit of flaking paint—but it’s also a bit of a powder keg, too. "Anytime you put a lot of people, especially people who are related, in a relatively small space for a week, it’s really fun to see what happens," says Moore. "I love that a beach house is typically, unless you’re super wealthy, not gigantic, and so you usually have multiple generations of people under one roof for a short amount of time in a way you might not any other place, and you get to watch the fireworks—literal but also figurative fireworks."
"Too many people in too small a space, it’s kind of like a gun in the first act of a play—you know something’s going to happen because everyone is so combustible in that scenario," says Newman. "What I wanted was for a basically functional, harmonious family to nonetheless be compressed into something like revelation."
Not only that, but a family beach house is a place of complicated nostalgia: "You’re probably bringing up memories of things you don’t think about during the year," says Moore. "There might be a seashell that you collected when you were ten years old, and it’s sitting there and it reminds you of something." The result: an argument that would never have happened at a neutrally decorated Airbnb that you’ve never seen before.
The key ingredients are long familiarity and layers of accrued memories: "The kids would always walk in and be like, oh, it smells like the beach house!" says Newman. "You would smell the smell and remember the last year when you walked in and smelled it, which reminds you of the year before that, everything telescoping."
The power of the fictional beach house lies in the juxtaposition: beach houses are an object of escapist fantasy, but at least as they usually appear in fiction, they’re more about weathered, comfortable familiarity rather than polished glamour. At the same time, they’re a way to explore class differences and financial disparities, within communities and within families, people bumping up against each other, often temporarily, dipping in from other worlds. They’re nostalgic, but they make great settings for nuclear family meltdowns about old hurts, or even just bittersweet moments of realization and transition.
The fantasy of the beach house is so established and powerful that authors can turn it upside down, too. Emily Henry’s bestseller Beach Read—currently being adapted for the big screen, starring Phoebe Dynevor and Patrick Schwarzenegger—features a sort of funhouse mirror version where narrator January retreats when her life falls apart. It’s the opposite of a nostalgic haven: It’s a lake cottage she knew nothing about where her father lived an entire double life with his mistress, which she finds out about at his funeral. She says her mother would have decorated it in "creamy, calming neutrals," a classic beach house color palette; instead, it’s got a blue-tiled kitchen described as "funky," hand-painted furniture, a couch covered in mismatched pillows.
But it’s still got cornflower blue shingles and snow-white trim, a "fairy-tale" porch and breeze-tossed beach grass, reminders that this is, after all, a beach read. If you must have a complete emotional crisis—as we all do, once in a while—it might as well be sitting in an Adirondack chair.
Related Reading:
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