"Onward to Watch Hill, the last coastal town in Rhode Island before crossing the state border into Connecticut. This grande dame of a village once vied with Newport as the toniest resort in the state, but its turn-of-the-20th-century shingled “cottages” were much less pretentious. Indeed, when I started visiting Watch Hill with my then-two-year-old son, it was a rambling, fraying, lost place; the large old houses were considered white elephants, hard to maintain, constantly battered by ocean wind and salt water.

We used to stay in the ramshackle Ocean House, built in 1868, with its huge stone hearth and communal dining room. The place always felt thrillingly, frighteningly as if it were about to slide into the ocean. We would head down toward the beach to ride the colorful wooden creatures of the Flying Horse Carousel. The wind caught their real tails and manes and we suspected we might soon spin off into the air. Residents claim that the carousel, built in 1879, is the oldest in the country.

But that was in the mid 1980’s, before the go-go years of the last boom economy. In the nineties, a new generation of money began to renovate the old houses. The Ocean House was rescued by Chuck Royce, a Wall Street financier with a passion for architecture. He spent an astonishing $146 million over five years to tear down the building and rebuild it, replicating the old exterior and its sunny color. Inside, there is little left of the old place, except for the handsome stone hearth—and the stunning views over a long, dramatic, sandy beach and the open ocean."

By Dominique Browning