DRESSED UP DOWN EAST

EMERALD LACQUER, HADLEY-ESQUE PATTERN, AND UNABASHED GLAMOUR: DESIGNER MATTHEW CARTER DELIVERS BIG DECORATING SWAGGER TO A CLASSIC SUMMER RETREAT IN MAINE.

- SOPHIE DONELSON

It was the quintessential Maine summer house, recalls Matthew Carter. "Pea gravel driveway, boxwoods, and ferns. Green shutters and beautifully proportioned rooms," explains the Lexington, Kentucky, decorator who smartly didn't touch any of that stuff.

For many families the interiors were nearly move-in ready: white plaster walls, cotton rugs, some toile-covered furnishings. "Simple and lovely," he reports.

That undecorated feel is the norm in much of coastal Maine, where many cottages change hands generationally and without much aesthetic fuss. A combination of Yankee ingenuity and the vestiges of Puritanism makes for homes that feel more "put together" than decorated. And near the water especially, there's an accepted shabbiness: The salt air lends a gracious patina to whale-motif weather vanes but also flays the undercarriages of Volvos.

There's a real vernacular here, and as Carter's first project in Maine, he could have enjoyed months of drinking in the source material, but he had to stay true to his clients. As he is, they're southerners. Shabby wasn't going to fly for the new homeowners, a Kentucky couple with adult children and grandchildren beginning to accumulate. "They wanted to vamp it up a bit," says Carter. "They have traditional taste-art, maps, threshold for color and pattern." antiques-but also a high