Braunwyn Jackett wanted to have a kitchen garden with a greenhouse. But not just that. “I knew I wanted to be able to hang out in it, too,” she says. “Let’s make it really tall so I can use the front, where it’s sunny, to start seedlings and have potted things in there and houseplants. And then also we can eat breakfast and have little dinner parties.”
“With fresh-cut salads,” says Nate McKean, adding to the picture. McKean is Jackett’s partner and a builder. When they collaborate on a project at their Truro home, her vision becomes his, too.
They built the kitchen garden in 2018, McKean adding his signature driftwood accents to Braunwyn’s layout. But then his fledgling company, McKean Artisan Builders, took on the restoration of the Mary Heaton Vorse house in Provincetown. The greenhouse went on the back burner for the next five years. He had readied the site, clearing brush, arranging a load of crushed stone, and situating a timber frame on top. The real foundation, though, had been laid much earlier.
McKean grew up in a creative family. His parents, he says, “were both artists, though not by trade.” He was born in Berkeley, Calif. but graduated from Provincetown High School in 1991 and won a scholarship to the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He quickly went into construction instead. He sees that as a natural progression. As far as artistic talent, he says, “We all had it in us, but we tapped into it in different ways.”
McKean returned to California, learning the carpenter’s craft alongside his brother Aaron for 12 years before moving to Colorado to home in on his interests. “I got really into the alternative green building style,” he says.
There, he learned how to use straw bales, adobe, refrigerators, tires, posts and beams: “Whatever you can imagine to build a house with.” He also ran into Jackett, and the two rekindled a romance from their high school days. Together, they started to imagine building much more than a house. They returned to the Cape in 2002 and bought a place of their own on Shore Road in 2007.
Jackett, who grew up in Truro, spent her childhood weekends in Provincetown with her grandmother Doris. “She loved her house and antiques and decorating,” says Jackett. “I definitely got a lot of my inspiration from her.” Doris’s table sits in the center of the greenhouse, with chairs from the swap shop at the dump in Truro.
When work on the greenhouse began in earnest last fall, it was a family affair. A lot of the construction was done by Ezra McKean, Nate and Braunwyn’s son, and Randy Ayala; both are employees of the company Nate started in 2018. The repurposed corbels on the southeast wall came from Astrid Berg, who until recently had an antiques collection at Pepe’s Wharf. Her nephew Nils Berg is one of McKean’s project managers; he and carpenter John Farrell added their expertise to the project, too.
Jackett is savoring her time in the garden. “I was raising babies for 28 years,” she says. Their youngest child, Iris, is now a junior at Nauset High; the eldest, Etel, was born in 1996.
In their early days together, things were lean. “Braunwyn and I didn’t have a lot of money to buy furniture or anything like that,” says McKean. But he saw that contractors doing renovations in town were “just throwing out all this old gorgeous wood.” The couple saw purpose in those castoffs. Braunwyn would sketch things out just so, and Nate would bring the scavenged pieces to life.
“She’s like, can you make me a coffee table?” he says. “And I’d make her a coffee table. Make me a bed? Made her a bed. And then the dining room table.” Friends took notice and started making requests of their own, and Nate began to build his business by word of mouth.
It was Braunwyn’s idea to make the greenhouse out of reclaimed materials. “We’ve been collecting windows and doors for years now for this,” she says. Many of the sashes came from a David Cafiero renovation in Provincetown, others from a trip to Maine. The barn door came from Architectural Salvage in Exeter, N.H., and they chanced upon the stained-glass windows at the Wellfleet Flea Market.
Bookending the fish crate coffee table are a pair of black peacock chairs, a gift from interior designer Ken Fulk. Impressed with McKean’s work — both for his neighbors’ renovation at 475 Commercial St. and his own commissioned driftwood back yard — Fulk tapped McKean in 2019 for the restoration of the historic Vorse house. “I walked in saying yes, I can do it, but scared,” says McKean. He steadied his nerves by letting the house and the wood talk to him, guiding him to put things back how they were meant to be.
“I was in heaven,” says McKean of working with someone who shared his love of historical restoration. “It was Ken’s vision, and I knew his vision because we shared that same passion and love.” The work took a year to complete, wrapping up in the spring of 2020. Business for McKean has been booming ever since.
Jackett says McKean’s strength is his ability to visualize other people’s dreams. “They give him their ideas, and he creates this beautiful thing,” she says. McKean is quick to return the compliment. “Really, Braunwyn makes my stuff look nice.”
A week ago, the greenhouse’s final touch was added: a curious blue sign they found on the property back when they bought their house. They haven’t inquired into its history yet. For now, even without that — maybe more so without that — it imbues the place they’ve built together with a sort of mythology and magic: Welcome to Hayshaker Farm.
