It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and Jim Doussard and Brad Crown are launching the Christmas season by hoisting a nine-foot pine tree from the backyard of their St. George Island weekend home. Using ropes to pull it three stories up and over the balcony, they haul it into the tower, which soars over the roofline like an umbrella tugged upward by the breeze. Never mind that Jim is allergic to pine and breaks out in hives while hanging family ornaments. “We refuse to get an artificial tree,” he says. 

The tower, a unique, sun-drenched room perched like a tree-topper on their waterfront retreat, affords 360-degree panorama of this historic island on the Potomac River. Rapunzel would have been happy confined to this space, all warm wood and glass. Its year-round views of St. George Creek and the St. Mary’s River, and of golden sunsets and stellar skyscapes, are even more gilded during this festive season with a wonderland of garlands, white lights, antique Lionel trains, and hydrangeas, which they grow and dry themselves.

Most of the year, a seaside theme prevails throughout the house—wooden sailboat models, mounted stuffed fish, and waterscapes by Southern Maryland printmaker Jeanne Norton Hammett. “This place is our anchor,” Jim says. “Each season, it has its own qualities indoors and out.” But at Christmas, Jim’s Santa collection—more than a hundred strong—is brought out from boxes under the stairs (he’s been collecting for more than a decade), adorning every niche and tabletop, and greens—pine garlands, fresh magnolia leaves, sprigs of cedar—appear everywhere. He’s unable to put a finger on exactly why he loves going all out for Christmas, but he started crafting elaborate Christmas cards when he was a student at Tulane University. When he got a house of his own, decorating became the natural extension. After they met, Brad caught the bug and lavish holiday preparations became a joint effort.

The twosome bought the small Cape Cod in 1996 as an escape from their home base in Washington, D.C., where they live in a formal 110-year-old Victorian on Capitol Hill. “We both have demanding jobs,” says Jim, a native of Louisville, Ky., and director of graphics for the Washington, D.C., office of HOK, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum architects. (Brad spent seventeen years with a D.C. firm before becoming senior project architect with Good Architecture in Annapolis last year.) “And this place is all about recharging the batteries.”

Cute but shabby when they found it, the house was constructed in the 1940s as part of a “family compound” of three dwellings for a local waterman and his sisters. The duo was so smitten that they returned eight times in one day before making an offer. They named it Moon River, evoking a song from one of Jim’s favorite movies, Breakfast at Tiffany’s; it’s a perfect fit for this waterside retreat. 

Brad and Jim did most of the interior work on the 1,200-square-foot home themselves (spackling, sanding, painting, repairs), bringing in help for specialized tasks, such as electrical wiring. They began the updating by gutting the ground-floor bathroom and adding new fixtures and a tiled shower. Next, they stripped linoleum from the kitchen and refinished the wood flooring before attacking the upstairs—an unfinished attic with wide-planked flooring. Their conundrum during the renovation was how to fit in a second-floor bathroom. 

As they brainstormed and doodled, the tower idea was born, allowing them to both expand the upstairs and add a third level that became the jewel of the house. They created plans and scale models for Mike Adams of A&A Restoration in Great Mills, Md., and the tower was completed just in time for Jim’s fortieth birthday party in September 2002.

A year later, Hurricane Isabel hit, flinging the front porch into the driveway, wiping out a dozen trees at the same time. Luckily, they had stored their furniture upstairs the weekend before and were able to set to work immediately, squeegeeing an inch of water from the floors, scraping out a film of muck, and drying and bleaching the drywall.  Jim starts our lively tour by showing off the new porch’s wood floor, which they stenciled with a checkerboard and compass pattern. The taping and staining are so precise that the result looks like parquet. A pair of brown leather armchairs is accented by Grandpa Doussard’s smoking stand, which stood in his apartment over the neighborhood market he ran in St. Louis. 

At Christmas, evergreen garlands and dried hydrangeas dress up the porch’s wooden beams. Here, on winter mornings, it’s great to sip coffee and watch swans glide past the pier, sometimes by the hundreds. 

Up a step and through a broad entryway, the porch opens into the warm yellow dining room, where black D.R. Dimes reproduction Windsor chairs surround an early-1900s oak table graced by a centerpiece of apples, artichokes, berries, and loblolly pine cones. In the corner, a six-foot tree shows off a range of decorations, which Jim and Brad collected on travels to Europe and Canada, plus glass ornaments handed down from Jim’s mom. A friend painted an image of Moon River on one special Christmas ball.

The curved wood mantel clock in the adjoining living room belonged to Great Aunt Julia, whom Jim remembers as having white hair, a spot of rouge on each cheek, a bourbon in one hand, a cigarette in the other. They bought the coffee table—a rectangular wooden cage—thinking it was an antique crab pot, only to learn later that it’s actually a chicken coop. “We like how it looks anyway,” says Brad, who was raised in Atlanta and Memphis. 

Greens spill over the wood-framed windows, continuing the Christmas theme. The framed three-by-four-foot nautical chart of the region on one wall, which they found rolled up in the garage, dates from 1917, before a bridge was built to the island. It clearly shows Cherryfield Point across the creek—where, during the American Revolution, Maryland soldiers battled British troops, who anchored off St. George, using it as a base from which to raid nearby plantations. Nearby Price’s Cove is named after Maj. Thomas Price, head of the local militia, who on July 25, 1776, ordered his men to march across a shallow strait and ambush the Brits, saving the region. Not long ago, Brad notes, a neighbor uncovered a twelve-pound cannonball from that battle while digging a swimming pool: “It’s amazing to think of the role our property played in American history.”

More antiques show up in the country kitchen, which they overhauled in 2004. The island, actually a wooden chopping block from a Baltimore butcher shop, is so worn that the surface slopes into a shallow bowl. New marsh-green and natural wood cabinets and plate racks blend seamlessly with an antique hutch. Black appliances and antique bronze light fixtures complement black Silestone countertops, which show off the pair’s collection of old jars and tins, including Bare Foot Boy tomatoes and Bosco chocolate sauce (a reminder of their long-lost golden retriever, Bosco, now buried on the property). They stenciled the wood floor with the same checkerboard pattern as the porch.

A magnificent trunk of wood, lacquer, and metal, which Brad took with him to college at the University of Tennessee in the 1970s (it took the same voyage to UT with Brad’s grandfather in the 1920s), is the centerpiece of the first-floor guest bedroom with its tidy twin beds—the only sleeping space in the house before they renovated the second floor.

Upstairs, they accented the soft green walls with golden brown beadboard in both the master bedroom and the adjoining TV room. One of Jim’s favorite pieces in the master bedroom is an 1880s Thonet rocker once owned by a family friend. (Michael Thonet, who in 1819 opened a furniture workshop in a small Austrian town, experimented with bending steamed wood and designed the first bentwood rockers.)
Guests are frequent at Moon River, where summer croquet games break out on the lawn as Riley and Chase, their golden retrievers, frolic in the creek and osprey soar. Spring will bring the planting of herbs and flowers in their English garden. In winter, it’s still and quiet, with the occasional dusting of snow. 

And Jim and Brad are hard at work on the hundred-plus Christmas cards they painstakingly make by hand: One year, they featured copper ornaments with cutouts of their Moon River logo, another year, with seed packets from moonflowers they cultivate, or refrigerator magnets with photos of that year’s osprey family nesting outside their window—Orville, Wilbur, and Amelia. And every year, the list gets a little longer…

Freelance writer Vicki Meade lives in Annapolis. Moon River is part of the Holiday Home Tour of St. George Island on Sun., Dec. 4, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. For more information, visit http://www.toursgi.com.