Home Tour: A “Coastal Grandma” Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage in Salem, Massachusetts

When Kristina Crestin first hopped on a small boat to Bakers Island, located about four miles off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts, she hadn’t realized she’d need to wait for the waves to settle—then jump directly onto some wet rocks—to come ashore, with all her supplies in tow.

To the Essex–based interior designer, best known for her work on the HGTV show Farmhouse Fixer, it felt a bit like storming the beaches of Normandy. “That’s the only thing I have in my head, when you picture the soldiers coming onto the beach,” Crestin says.

Because the 60-acre island has no public dock, the boat, operated by the nonprofit Essex Heritage, lands in a slightly different spot each time depending on the tides—much as boats did when lighthouse keepers worked around the clock to keep Bakers Island Light Station operating for over 150 years.

“I know how dicey it can be getting out on our boat,” says Cheri Grishin, director of operations for Essex Heritage, which owns and maintains the light station as part of the Essex National Heritage Area. “I can’t imagine how it used to be, getting out to the island year-round and in the winter.”

While there’s an air of romance around the idea of being a lighthouse keeper off the coast of New England, it was a demanding, often dangerous post, with keepers on Bakers Island regularly rescuing people from shipwrecked boats in the harbor.

“It was definitely a hard life,” says Ryan Conary, Essex Heritage’s program and event manager. “It was a day of constantly refueling the lens and keeping the fire lit at night every couple hours.” The keepers often brought their families to live with them, raising livestock and growing their own food on the island. Conary likens it to living off the grid—just with nonstop work mixed in.

“Scraped oil + gas tanks at boat house. Brot out lawn mower,” reads a June 1934 journal entry from Ernest Sampson, the lighthouse’s assistant keeper in the 1930s. Scribbled in the memos is another note: “Was going to quit but changed mind.”

Bakers Island Light was originally constructed along with a smaller twin lighthouse in 1798 as a navigational aid for Salem Harbor. They were rebuilt as taller granite towers in 1816 and 1820, though the shorter of the two was dismantled in 1926. Today, the remaining lighthouse is automated and operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. Volunteer keepers get a tiny sliver of Sampson’s experience each summer, while most members of Essex Heritage can rent out the 1873 assistant keeper’s cottage for a coastal getaway minus the chores.

It was this rental that caught the interest of the producers of Farmhouse Fixer, the 2021–2024 show in which Crestin teamed up with Dorchester native and former New Kids on the Block member Jonathan Knight to restore antique New England homes. They’d been searching for a lighthouse project to feature, and wondered if the assistant keeper’s house could use a professional makeover.

The caveat: Essex Heritage would have to foot the bill. So Knight and Crestin stepped in to help with fundraising efforts—at one point raffling off the opportunity for a fan to run their hand through Knight’s hair—and raised enough to pump up the budget to $100,000.

From there, Knight and Crestin put their heads together to take the bare-bones cottage, filled with Ikea furniture and aging builder-grade fixtures, to what Crestin calls a nostalgic “coastal grandma” getaway. In the kitchen, for instance, the duo decided to paint the cabinets a deep blue; bring in a candy-colored, retro-style refrigerator; and install light fixtures resembling those from a ship, bought at Marblehead’s Brass ’n Bounty.

Essex Heritage also opted to refurbish the cottage’s 1930s Crawford cast-iron stove—a fixture that weighed more than 300 pounds—which required lugging it back to the mainland. “It had to go across a field, go down the rocks, get on the boat, go through the harbor,” Crestin says. “It’s a little bit nuts.”

Beyond the daunting task of transporting everything to and from the island’s rocky shores, there was another challenge: Almost all of the work on the cottage was done by Essex Heritage volunteers, a group of non-tradespeople who worked only on Wednesdays. And when seas were rough or storms were in the forecast, timelines were pushed back even further.

But this historical renovation had been a long time coming, as Crestin and her team were reminded when they discovered the names of former Coast Guard members inscribed on old wall studs and dated April 1966. “We opened up the ceiling. We opened up the walls,” she explains. “We saw all sorts of writing of past people who had worked on it over the years.” (As a nod to the renovators of years past, Crestin and the team wrote their names, too, dated 2023.)

Aside from decades-old doodles, the team found classic board-and-batten under the cottage’s walls—a look that Crestin had already outlined in her plans. “That was totally validating as a design choice,” she says, electing to preserve the old-school paneling style. And after opening the ceiling, the team discovered the original wooden subfloor from above was in excellent shape, so they decided to leave it exposed. “It’s dark, but this is what makes it feel like an antique cottage in New England,” Crestin adds.

She hung a brass light fixture with hobnail milk-glass shades in the center of the exposed beams, outfitting the rest of the home with nautical flags, wooden buoys, rope accents, and other marine-related touches. Crestin sourced scores of nautical antiques and accessories from her favorite shops up and down the coast of Maine, including Cabot Mill Antiques in Brunswick and Antiques USA in Arundel.

“I did so many road trips just trying to find things that felt like they would fit here, because I didn’t want it to look like somebody just decorated it that year,” she says. “The whole point is that somebody’s going to take the effort to rent this cottage, go on the boat, and make a whole excursion of it.”

The idea is for guests to step back in time—away from screens and other modern interruptions—and enjoy the salt air. “When you arrive, you want it to feel like an experience,” Crestin says. “You want it to feel like something that was collected over time.”

In addition to renting out the assistant keeper’s house (available to Essex Heritage members of Voyager level or higher), Essex Heritage offers Bakers Island boat tours and opportunities to camp on the island during the summer season. For details, go to bakersislandlight.org.

This feature was originally published as “Totally Lit” in the September/October 2026 issue of Yankee.

Madeline Bilis

Madeline Bilis is a writer, editor, and enthusiastic New Englander. She studied journalism at Emerson College and hails from an exciting town outside of Worcester.

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