A Family Affair
Preserving and passing on summer homes

by Nell Porter Brown

Although I have spent only a month or two here each year for four decades, I have always thought of it as home, if home is the one place that will be in your bones forever.

So writes George Howe Colt ’76 in his evocative book, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home. For five generations, his extended family gathered at the 11-bedroom, fairy-tale home on a Cape Cod peninsula, a witness to the unfolding of multiple lives. “The house watched over five weddings, four divorces, three deaths, several nervous breakdowns, an untold number of conceptions, and countless birthday parties, anniversaries, and love affairs.” When his father called him a few years ago to say he had some “bad news,” Colt assumed there’d been a death in the family. “And it did turn out to be a sort of death,” he explained in a recent interview. “My parents had decided to sell the house.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Attorney Matthew Berlin takes in a Vermont home and landscape preserved for generations to come.

Summer dwellings—from romantic seaside Victorians and lakeside camps to mountain cabins or bungalows in the woods—can hold a sacred place in the heart of a family through generations. Since his book was published in 2003, Colt has been contacted by hundreds of readers, many of whom talk about the pain of losing long-held homes. “In almost all the cases, the feelings come from having spent their childhoods going there,” he says. “They worry about ‘What is going to happen to all those memories of childhood if that house is gone?’ ‘What will happen to our family if we don’t gather there anymore?’ ‘Will the family split apart?’ These houses are a sort of repository for these very tangible feelings and memories from childhood” that trail us into adulthood.

“In my experience, the family compounds or summer homes are meaningful to the next generation because they hold the family stories. They are often the positive glue that holds a family together,” says Charles W. Collier, senior philanthropic advisor at Harvard and the author of Wealth in Families, which explores family relationships and money. “For many children, including mine in regard to our place in New Hampshire, the summer house is where the roots are, because they’ve been going there since they were young children.”

Matthew A. Berlin ’89, a partner in the trusts and estates department of Rubin and Rudman in Boston, advises families on succession planning. “What deepens the complexity around inherited property are the relationships among family members,” he allows. “Shared administrative responsibilities can often become a forum for airing other issues whose provenance lies deep within the family history.” That can include an uncomfortable revisiting of sibling rivalries. “Was one sibling more dominant than the others? Is what the siblings want from the house different? Are there differing views on how a property should be used?” Berlin asks. Moreover, if transfer of the property occurs while the elder generation is still alive, its members are, in essence, relinquishing their roles as hosts, caretakers, and authorities over the summer home to their children, causing a shifting of roles and relationships that poses its own emotional—and financial—risks. (Berlin advises clients who are weighing options to reread King Lear. )

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A Family AffairPreserving and passing on summer homes

A Family Affair
Preserving and passing on summer homes