CAROLINA COOL

On the Crystal Coast, an oceanfront home is a model for 21st-century modernism.

- J. Michael Welton

TWO ALUMS FROM NORTH CAROLINA STATES architecture program—one a client and the other a designer—teamed up in 2017 to create a contemporary waterfront home at Pine Knoll Shores.

Michael Schley graduated from the School of Design in Raleigh in 1975. He went to work for a large Houston firm for 10 years, then readjusted the arc of his career trajectory. I realized that I was not the great design talent to which I aspired,” he says. And I got into facilities management software.”

The late Michael Kersting graduated from North Carolina's State's College of Design in 1990, practiced for three years in Santa Fe, then set up shop in 1995 in Wilmington, North Carolina. When Schley and his wife, Karen, called him about designing a retreat on the beach, Kersting took full measure of Schley’s success: He jumped out of architecture and into software—and went on to earn enough to hire an architect,” he said.

And not just any architect. Kersting and his associates are known for designing highend, custom homes on the coast and across North Carolina. Most are contemporary. One influence for our office is that we’re big fans of architecture built in the 1970s on Fire Island off the coast of Long Island, New York]” he said. That’s what we were trying to tap into here, to let the landscape and modern architecture be bold.”

Their clients didn’t want their new home to be a replica of a midcentury modern, but to stand on its own as a 21st-century beach house. Kersting agreed. We wanted clean and classic, not retro,” the architect said.