Why stay in Los Angeles when you could work remotely from Nantucket?

Nantucket Island, Massachusetts has long been a favorite haunt of Tom Forman and Tanya McQueen Forman. Mr. Forman, 50, a television producer, grew up outside Boston and spent summers on Nantucket with his family. When he introduced the island to Mrs. McQueen Forman, a native of Texas, she too fell in love.

“We brought our family here every summer since I met Tom, and we’ve been together for 18 years,” said Ms. McQueen Forman, 51, an interior designer and former TV personality on home improvement shows like “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, where she met Mr. Forman. “It was just the place of our dreams.”

When the pandemic hit, they were living in Los Angeles with their two youngest children, Owen, now 20, and Bee, 18. (Their two oldest children had already moved.) And they worried that they would have to break Nantucket tradition. , because traveling had become so complicated.

Still, they managed to make the journey across the country. Once they got to the island, they realized there was little reason to leave anytime soon. “We found that Tom could work from anywhere,” said Ms. McQueen Forman. “We came for our usual three-week trip and thought, ‘Why would we go back to Los Angeles?'”

They found a long-term rental to stay for a few more months, but had no immediate plans to buy a house. “We always dream of one day having our own home here, but we thought we would have to wait until I retire,” said Mr. Forman.

But as serial renovators, they couldn’t help but follow the real estate listings. One morning, perusing the listings on separate devices, they simultaneously discovered a new one: a 19th-century dairy barn that had been dismantled in New Jersey, transported to Nantucket, and rebuilt as a 4,000-square-foot home in the 1990s.

“We were within earshot of each other, and I said, ‘I know we’re not buying a house right now, but there’s one for sale that we need to go look at,’” said Ms. McQueen Forman. Mr. Forman was about to suggest the same thing.

When they got there, “we just looked at each other and fell in love,” he said.

They purchased the property for $3.295 million in October 2020. While they admired the old barn’s exposed posts and beams, there were things they wanted to change, starting with additions from the past three decades.

“There was a lot to work with, but there was also a lot of evil,” said Ms. McQueen Forman. “I was determined to honor the coastal vibe and history, but make it very fresh and modern, mixing modern touches with the old.”

The first step would be to refit all five 1990s-era bathrooms. When construction began, it quickly became clear that those updates wouldn’t happen as fast as they do on TV. It took about a year to complete the baths.

“When you think about the fact that I met Tom on a show where we built a house in a week, doing five bathrooms in a year blew my mind,” said Ms McQueen Forman. “I had a hard time accepting it.”

But after harassing their contractors with donuts and coffee in the morning and beer at the end of the day, they nailed it, including the master bedroom’s his-and-her bathrooms. Mrs. McQueen Forman got a bathroom with a cast-iron freestanding tub and floral wallpaper; Mr. Forman got bead paneled walls and a tadelakt shower with an arched doorway.

Renovating the kitchen took another year. Ms. McQueen Forman placed new cabinets and appliances behind paneled walls that do not reach the ceiling. Going for a rustic vibe, she topped solid white oak cabinets with soapstone countertops and left the wood and stone unsealed. On the other side of one of the paneled walls, facing the living room, she added doors that open to a hidden pantry and a full-height beverage cooler that makes it easy to fill coolers for the beach.

Upstairs, where there was a sleeping loft overlooking the living room, he enclosed the space with split-light windows to create a home office for Mr. Forman.

After figuring out how to hide electrical wiring, plumbing, and air conditioning ducts around the building’s open structure, they added decorative touches: a large-scale knotted rope artwork by Alex Buchanan mounted above the fireplace; a wooden dining room chandelier from the Round Top Antiques Show in Texas; and an old wicker bar that Mr. Forman had shipped from Indianapolis.

With Bee heading off to college later this year, the couple plans to split their time between Los Angeles and Nantucket. So far, they’ve spent about $1 million renovating, Forman estimated, but they continue to upgrade.

“It’s been a meticulous, non-historical restoration,” Forman said. “It is not a famous building or an important building. It’s a great building.”

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