SB VisualsFor years, Lisa and Eric Lewis kept a boat docked at Palafox Marina. When they came to Pensacola, they stayed aboard, walked to dinner, wandered the downtown streets and loved not needing a car.
After many visits, the couple fell in love with Pensacola and decided it would be the perfect place to retire.
“Once we decided that Pensacola would be our retirement home, we discovered the Aragon neighborhood and immediately fell in love with its location,” homeowner Lisa Lewis said. “We were drawn to its proximity to the water and the marina, as well as its easy walkability to downtown restaurants, shopping and cultural attractions. It truly offers the best of coastal and city living.”
The house they built together in Aragon features a modern French country vibe and boasts four bedrooms, four and a half baths, a carriage house apartment above the garage and a courtyard pool the color of the Gulf.
The classical facade is a showstopper. Painted white brick stretches across two stories, with six arches (three on each level) stacked in perfect symmetry, flanked by parapet walls and trimmed in deep charcoal. It combines classical, European and coastal elements in a way that feels natural and intentional. Architect Scott Sallis of Dalrymple Sallis Architecture designed the structure with what he describes as a clean, classical approach driven by the homeowners’ preferences and the Aragon neighborhood’s design guidelines, which steer buildings toward courtyard-centered living and encourage the kind of architectural detail that reads well at street level.
“Constraints can be a great thing,” Sallis said. “Empty slates and blank paper can create even more obstacles for a designer.”
What visitors cannot see is what lies beneath. The site sits over weakened soils where Cadet’s Creek once ran, requiring helical pier foundations and additional structural investment before a single brick went up. When Lewis later chose Pennsylvania bluestone for the outdoor surfaces, heavier than originally planned, crews had to go back in and reinforce further. “We have a lot of money under the ground,” Lewis said.
Inside, the home unfolds with Southern charm, French refinement and coastal colors all seamlessly integrated into a cozy, stunning home. Lewis is a retired interior designer, and she had a defined vision from the start. She wanted European influence, classical lines and a palette that would feel timeless in both the architectural context of Aragon and the broader history of Pensacola.
Sallis put it plainly: “Lisa is a delightful client with classically trained excellent taste. It was a great collaboration, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
The living room is where that collaboration is most visible. White oak beams run across the ceiling, which Aragon requires to be a minimum of 10 feet, but in the Lewis home, reach 12 and a half feet. A custom fireplace surround, built from white oak sheets that trim carpenters fabricated on site, anchors the room. A framed TV sits centered above the mantle. Printed drapes in a blue and cream botanical pattern frame the windows.
The kitchen began with a tile. The mosaic backsplash behind the custom blue bar cabinet tucked just off the kitchen became the unlikely source of the home’s entire color palette. “A lot of times it’s a rug or a fabric or something that a homeowner loves,” Lewis said. “But basically, the colors of my house are in that tile.”
From there, the kitchen came together around a Lacanche range in a soft blue, a French professional appliance Lewis researched carefully before choosing for its oven capacity and traditional aesthetic. Custom cabinetry by Stile Cabinetry, a local firm, is white oak with a custom gray-white finish and beaded detailing. Counters are White Rhino Dolomite, a natural stone with the look of marble but a honed finish that doesn’t show fingerprints. The white oak flooring continues into the foyer, where it’s cut in a decorative inlaid pattern at the entry.
Every room in the house is different by design. The study is the house’s one clear departure from the European palette. The room features grass cloth walls in deep teal green, a cognac leather sofa, a sculptural marble coffee table and extra insulation packed into the walls and ceiling specifically to contain sound. The room was designed around Eric’s love of music. “He enjoys music of all genres and loves sharing it with friends,” Lewis said.
The primary suite carries the home’s water theme into its most elaborate spaces. A four-poster bed sits beneath a bubble glass chandelier that Lewis chose specifically for this room, resisting the common impulse to put it in a living room. “To me, it’s dreamy,” she said. The seascape in the primary bath is a hand-painted mural, commissioned from Bekye Fargason with a request from Lewis to include water, a strong sun and sandy tones woven through. The pale pink handmade Moroccan Zellige tile in the bath and shower is deeply textural and adds both lightness and depth to the room.
The powder room mural looks like wallpaper and most of it is. When the second set of panels came up short, Lewis painted the gap herself, extending a tree up into the corner and the sky, matching the wallpaper exactly.
The home uses wallpaper in many rooms and in many ways. One guest bedroom uses a bold green with a pattern that Lewis calls a modern take on an old design. “This was the hardest wallpaper for me to choose because I knew I wanted the more muted one in the adjoining bathroom. They couldn’t compete, but they had to have the same color,” she said.
Out back, the Aragon design philosophy of indoor-outdoor living is captured perfectly. A covered living room with a brick fireplace and three televisions opens to a courtyard. The pool is small by some standards—Lewis calls it a cocktail pool. It is geothermal, drawing on ground temperature to keep the water swimmable through a Pensacola July. The tile is a Gulf-blue that ties back to the marina and the couple’s love of water.
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After decades in rural Mississippi, the couple found that they love the energy of a downtown city block and the pleasure of being connected to something larger than a house.
“I’ve come to enjoy the city’s energy, watching neighbors walk by, seeing a bit of traffic and soaking in Pensacola’s beautiful weather,” she said. “It’s such a charming, connected space.”