A herd of yapping pug dogs bounds out of nowhere as I step from my car at Stanley and Janet Kane’s house. Moving like a flock of blackbirds – changing direction in complete synchronicity with one another – they run back and forth until finally coming to rest in a perfect, evenly spaced row directly in front of the main entrance. Though all four dogs are growling menacingly, I have always liked pugs, so I stride confidently toward this gang, saying out loud to them, “What are you guys, the Unwelcome Wagon?”

Their bluff called, they mill around my legs, emitting the occasional after-bark, as though to save face. Their ruckus rouses the attention of the people inside the house, and a young man dressed sharply in a pressed, white button-down shirt and dark pants opens the door. I learn later that his name is Santiago, and he is the male half of a couple from Paraguay who has worked for the Kanes “forever.” Behind Santiago stands an older man with a pleasant, roundish face and graying hair who extends his hand and introduces himself as Stanley Kane.

“Janet’s in the other room,” he says, leading the way to a room full of light with a bar at one end, behind which Janet Kane is arranging flowers.
She says hello, seeming flustered, and explains that she is still suffering from jet lag, she and Stanley having just returned from a cruise in Alaska. Her voice is raspy, her hair slightly fly-away, and her sense of humor, droll.

We sit on the terrace, the pugs at our feet, looking out toward the tennis court, the pool, the manicured gardens and lawns, and beyond them, the rolling hillsides that belong to Tashmoo Associates Inc. The Kanes’ house – one of twenty-two in the association – is the first on the right as you enter the lower end of Lambert’s Cove Road. It is a site often painted by Island artists because of the beauty of the long, twin, tree-lined dirt lanes leading down to the house, framed by stone walls on one side and split-rail fencing on the other. Horses graze in the field to the right of the fence; to the left of the stone walls is the old Tashmoo Farm.

The Kanes bought this house and its ten surrounding acres from the widow of a former president of Saks Fifth Avenue six or seven years ago – they’re vague on exactly when. At the time of purchase, they had seen the house once. They had come to the Vineyard to visit their daughter, who summers up-Island, and decided to rent a house themselves for the following year. The thought was that if they liked the Island, they might eventually buy a place. They arranged to rent the house in Tashmoo. Almost as an afterthought, they also purchased a right of first refusal should the house go up for sale. A few weeks later, when they were back at home in Sarasota, they got a call saying that the house was going on the market, and they had ten days in which to decide whether to buy it.

Having seen the house only briefly, they asked a friend who was still on the Island to go over and take a look at it for them. They laugh now at the understatement of her assessment: She said, “It needs some work.” The Kanes hired a home inspector to look at the house, and he came back to them with a list “inches thick” of what needed fixing. But they bought the house anyway. When I ask Janet what was involved in their subsequent renovations, she replies, “Two words: mucho dinero.”

To begin with, the house was sinking. Set above a dirt crawl space rather than a basement, its structural supports were rotting. The house had to be lifted and an entirely new foundation built beneath it. “It was an engineer’s dream job,” Janet says. “It cost more than the price of the house and land.” Then the electrical system started to go and had to be redone. The tennis court, too, needed a complete overhaul that involved raising it several inches and building a
retaining wall along one of its sides.

While they were at it, the Kanes put in a pool and a pool house, the latter attached to the main house by a pergola-covered walkway. While some cosmetic changes were made to the main structure of the house – a three-sided bay window with window seats was built in the family room, for example – the Kanes tried as much as possible to maintain the character of the house, which is nearly three centuries old. In the living room fireplace, there is an original cookpot hanging from a swinging cast-iron arm. Upstairs, there are steps up and down between rooms (including the two-bedroom guest area that the Kanes call the Princess Di Suite because Di once rented the house), belying the times in the past when the house was added onto.

Stanley Kane keeps copies of old, handwritten legal documents relating to the house that were given to him when he bought it. Standing over the desk in his office, he leafs through the copies, trying to get a sense of exactly when the house was built. The earliest date he can find is 1726, and he notes that the lawyer for a Captain Look, who built the house, was named Norton. “Our lawyer when we bought the house was named Norton, too,” he says, smiling at the Islandness of this coincidence.

When the house was built, its driveway went out to State Road, and the old front door faces in that direction. Stanley points out that the handle on that door is original. The two glass panes at its top are not, but they’re each made of thick bubbly glass with a dimple in the middle, like the bottom of a wine bottle, and they look appropriate to the period. Just inside that door, a set of steep stairs that would never meet code these days heads upward from a small entry vestibule. “The treads on these stairs are very narrow,” Janet says. “I wonder if it’s because, back when this house was built, people had smaller feet.”

There are several places to choose among if you want to sit and talk downstairs: There’s the old screened porch, which the Kanes enclosed to make a small sitting room, decorated with painted portraits of their grandchildren when they were young. There’s the living room, where every chair sports a pug pillow (pug pillows and pictures are everywhere throughout the house). There’s the family room, with its large, flat-screen TV and a table set up for bridge and Scrabble. There’s the terrace, the sunroom with the bar at one end, and the kitchen table, where we wind up after a tour of the house. Outside the kitchen door is a mini-Versailles of an herb garden – the orderly sets of herbs growing in the spaces created by a crisscrossed rectangle of low, pruned box bush, surrounded by flagstones.

Janet tells me that when she and Stanley arrived for their first summer in their new house, the renovations were far from completed. They had brought two of Trip Barnes’s moving vans full of furniture purchased in Florida that had to be stored for the summer, but they salvaged a mattress from it for their bedroom and some china to eat off of, and with that, they settled in. Their first night here, they boiled some pasta on a hot plate they found in the house and called it dinner. Later, they bought a grill. Initially, the dining room was a workshop, but by the time they left, everything was finished.

But even with all the work they put into the house, Stanley and Janet Kane aren’t sure they’ll stay on the Vineyard. Janet likes her life here: she has a daily routine that involves Pilates classes, trips to Cronig’s Market, and an occasional visit to chiropractor and healer Nancy Berger. They throw dinner parties, and they import numerous friends from Florida every summer. While they enjoy this replication of their busy Sarasota social life, Janet acknowledges that “it’s a little wearing; we feel a bit like a B&B.”

The real question mark, though, is Stanley. Stanley plays golf and tennis, but according to Janet, he spends most of his day on the phone in his office. “I can flop around all day and have a great time,” says Janet, “but Stanley needs his work.” Stanley nods in agreement. “My business interests are in Sarasota,” he says. Stanley is something of a workaholic. He is involved in investments and real estate development, and he chairs a company called Kane Millercorp, a food conglomerate that he and a couple of other investors took private in 1984. Stanley’s business is important in the couple’s lives, because, Janet admits, “I am an immoderate consumer.” When they were renovating the house, she says, “I made the design decisions, but Stanley looked at the bids and decided who would carry them out.”

Stanley and Janet Kane have taken a beautiful old house and saved it from collapse. They have become supporters of various Island causes, including Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, one of the oldest land-conservation groups on the Island, whose annual benefit they hosted this past summer, and the Chilmark dance colony known as The Yard. They have made friends here. Married for fifty-eight years (“It’s amazing that we’ve been able to stand each other all this time!” says Janet), they certainly know how to stick to a thing. But it’s still an open question as to whether they will stick to the Vineyard.