In 1989, Ken Warwick was looking for a getaway home on the Eastern Shore, but he soon found that many of the towns had become too expensive and commercialized for his taste. Then an article in the Baltimore Sun introduced him to Betterton, Md., a sleepy Kent County hamlet located where the Sassafras River meets the Chesapeake Bay.

There, the Baltimore-based architect and budding artist thought he had found the perfect, serene retreat in which to work on his charcoal drawings. “It was the antithesis of Baltimore City,” says Warwick, fifty-seven. “There’s no store, nothing commercial, not even a restaurant. There’s the beach and the natural environment. That’s about it.”

Once a bustling community during the steamboat era, famous for the only nettle-free beach (cool, fresh water from the Sassafras forces them further out into the Bay), Betterton was called “The Jewel of the Chesapeake.” The town fell on hard times when the Bay Bridge was built and vacationers could easily speed to the ocean. But Warwick, who bought his home in Baltimore’s Federal Hill more than twenty years ago, long before that neighborhood’s renaissance, saw beauty and opportunity in Betterton’s graying stature. “Part of the architect in me sees that these places never lose their character. They just go through cycles,” he says.

In 1991 he bought a lot a block away from the beach and designed a house, which he never got around to building. But when the property adjacent to his, which contained a cottage, came up for sale, he purchased it with thoughts of rehabilitating it.

The structure was, in fact, little more than a very small garage cum beach cabana that didn’t even have hot water. While the redesign seemed a manageable project, in the end, only the slab was salvageable. Instead, Warwick designed on the original footprint a 750-square-foot cottage with an artist’s studio housed on a second-floor loft.

The house shares many of the same characteristics of a Nantucket beach cottage but infuses a sparse minimalism in its design. To make the home seem bigger, Warwick borrowed a Japanese design characteristic where rooms are open to one anther, creating a feeling of continuation, movement, and space. “Because it was so small, it needed to be as open as possible,” he explains. “I’ve always had great respect for the Japanese aesthetic and how they live in multi-functional rooms.”

Another cultural inspiration came from the pared-down, clean design favored in Scandinavia and that country’s summer cottages, which is where he got the idea to paint the pine floors bright, reflective white.

The furnishings, such as the living room’s “womb chair” created by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen and the Louis Poulsen “snowball” chandelier in the kitchen, are mid-century modern. For the cottage’s exterior, Warwick used cedar shingles and also recalled the original garage with a corrugated metal sliding barn door that covers the front screen doors.

Last year he spent a portion of the Christmas season at the cottage. Seiko Behr, a Chestertown artist respon-sible for a series of pots on display in the house, created traditional Japanese flower arrangements (called “Ikebana") in a holiday theme, while the Christmas tree was mounted in the second-story loft where Warwick could see it from his studio. 

When Warwick finally moved into the cottage in 2006, it became a haven for him to work on his geometric charcoal drawings, which grace the walls of his studio. And while Betterton is mostly a summer community, Warwick uses his house as a workspace year-round.

“I like it here in the winter,” he says. “It’s very quiet and very peaceful. My drawing work tends to be somewhat cerebral, and it’s kind of nice to have that simple, quiet, almost stark quality around.”

Warwick says he will probably never leave Baltimore City entirely behind, but the solitude of Betterton has more than brought him the artistic inspiration he hoped for. “My artwork has changed being here,” he says. “Before it was rigid, dark, and more theoretical. Now it’s more open, and the landscape is creeping into the work. I don’t know where it is going, but [being here] has changed the work.”

Christianna McCausland writes from Arlington, Va.