© Kit Noble
Guests strolling the sweeping sunlit lawns outside the White Elephant Nantucket are in for picture-perfect harbor views — but the property’s true pièces de résistance are on full display inside. Fresh off a top-to-bottom multimillion-dollar renovation, art plays a pivotal role in this bright, airy refreshed masterpiece.
The White Elephant collaborated with Elkus Manfredi Architects and art consultant and curator Emily Santangelo to ensure paintings hanging for years in the hotel remained a focal point during the process of integrating contemporary pieces into the design of the historic, landmarked building. “The White Elephant carries a reputation of service and quality to begin with, and with the renovation and new collection of artwork, I wanted there to be a sense of surprise but comfort at the same time,” Santangelo says.
As part of that goal, Santangelo and the White Elephant Nantucket launched the Artist in Residency Program in August 2022. The six invited artists lived in the hotel for two weeks and drew inspiration from the surroundings before creating their original works. “It was a labor of love to find the artists that were really going to complement not only the design,” Santangelo says, “but the island as well.”
Nearly 300 of the new pieces are now showcased throughout the property’s corridors, 54 rooms and suites and 11 garden cottages — from New England-focused painter Mary Chandler’s watercolors of buttery yellow honeysuckle and other Nantucket flora to installation photographer Thomas Jackson’s dreamy pastel beach portraits. Santangelo points out that no two rooms contain the exact same works so each stay is guaranteed to always be a unique artistic experience.
© Connie Zhou
Perhaps the most stunning piece in the new collection is a 16-foot-long painting featuring a woman wearing Nantucket reds floating in a rowboat with cottages reflected in the harbor’s waters behind her. The commissioned sunny large-scale pop piece by Orit Fuchs, an Israeli painter who also created a tondo of the same woman for sister property White Elephant Palm Beach, cheerily welcomes guests to the resort’s lobby. “The idea was that when you walked through the door, you already have this sense of lightness, a feeling that you’re in for this wonderful experience,” Santangelo says.
Staff affectionately call the woman in the boat Elizabeth, a nod to Elizabeth T. Ludwig, the socialite who, in the 1920s, began accruing piecemeal the properties that now make up White Elephant Nantucket.
© Connie Zhou
The rowboat painting is bathed in soothing blues to match Nantucket’s sapphire seas and turquoise skies, and the color palette found throughout the hotel was likewise selected with intention. The exteriors of homes and cottages on the island can only be painted several approved shades to maintain its historic character — often with an added pop of color, like Nantucket Red, Hamilton Blue, Quaker Gray or Main Street Yellow — and the White Elephant was inspired to use similar hues in the redesign.
The property’s rooms, suites and cottages are also awash in soft coastal and earth tones. Other small design brushstrokes might include grass cloth wallcoverings meant to evoke dune grasses sprouting along the shore, ceilings painted pale blue to add the calming feel of a clear summer day, or corridor carpets with a crisscrossed pattern that call to mind weathered gray shingles cladding the quaint homes dotting Nantucket.
Thoughtful details like these add texture that enhance the property’s complete collection of older and newer art, providing the perfect canvas for an East Coast getaway. All guests have to do is create their own Nantucket masterpieces, ones sure to be tinted with romantic nostalgia and contrasted with colorful new memories formed on this charming island oasis. Visit White Elephant Nantucket; 50 Easton Street, Nantucket, MA; whiteelephantnantucket.com
