About Us

Welcome to Coastal Home, where we travel coast-to-coast, sharing our daily experiences and love of all things design. As founders of OurBoatHouse.com, we bring you the best products related to sea-inspired living, but we hope this blog will serve as much as a source of inspiration for you as it does for us everyday. 

About Karen Marcil and Lori Smith:

As sisters, we grew up in the Hamptons before the Hamptons were chic. Our time was spent living and loving the surrounding waterways-from the salty marshes to the roaring waves of the Atlantic Ocean. A large close-knit family, we spent weekends and summers celebrating life on the beach with Cousins, Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents. Our best memories are of times on the water-boating, clamming, sailing, fishing, crabbing, eeling, surfing and everything else involving the water. Maybe it was part of our Swedish heritage, but at a very young age we developed a deep love and yearning to be close to the sea water, the sandy beaches and the salt air.

With parents involved in real estate, the love of home design became a family obsession. Our passion for creating a home that is welcoming and brings the essence of the sea into the home, led us to search for the most special, unique nautical beachy furnishings. Our most recent project, utilizing the found treasures, drew such an overwhelming response and interest that we began the development of OurBoatHouse.com to share our special nautical finds and help homeowners and designers create a beach home that is comfortable for the entire family, a place to enjoy life and to nourish the soul.