Summer 2026 · Lake Worth Inlet
A Saturday on Peanut Island
Every family that lives near the water has one ritual it refuses to give up. Ours is Peanut Island — the little green island sitting right in the Lake Worth Inlet, close enough to see from the Riviera Beach marinas and just far enough to feel like an escape.
We go early, before the sandbar crowd arrives: water taxi or our own boat, coolers packed, four boys already negotiating who gets the snorkel with the good mask. The lagoon on the island’s edge is calm and clear, the kind of shallow, protected water where kids can drift for an hour watching fish traffic while the adults watch boat traffic — sportfishers heading out through the inlet, sailboats coming home.
Bring more water than you think you need, claim shade early, and check the tide chart before you plan the day — the island is at its best around slack tide. And when someone asks me why people fall so hard for this stretch of coast, I usually just describe a Saturday out there: salt, sun, a picnic on public sand in the middle of a working inlet, ten minutes from home.
That’s the thing about Palm Beach County — the postcard isn’t a vacation here. It’s a weekend habit.
— Joanna
Summer 2026 · West Palm Beach
Design Hunting on Antique Row
After two decades building custom homes with my husband, I can tell you the secret ingredient of a coastal house that feels finished: one thing that wasn’t bought new. A brass ship’s lamp with real weight to it. A rattan chair that’s done forty summers already. Art that faded slightly in somebody else’s sunroom before it ever reached yours.
My hunting ground is Antique Row, the stretch of South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach where the dealers cluster. I go the way some people go to the gym — regularly, and with intention. Some days it’s for a client’s staging; some days it’s “research” that comes home in my back seat.
Here’s the builder’s-eye reason it matters: new coastal construction is bright, white, and clean-lined, which photographs beautifully and can feel like a model home forever if you let it. Older pieces add the mineral notes — patina, brass, worn wood — that make white walls read as calm instead of empty.
If you’re furnishing a new place on the coast, start with one old thing you love and build the room around it. And if you find a good sea chest before I do, I don’t want to hear about it.
— Joanna
Summer 2026 · Juno Beach & the ocean towns
Turtle Season on the Beaches
From spring through the end of October, our beaches quietly become a nursery. Sea turtles — loggerheads especially, along with greens and leatherbacks — crawl ashore at night to nest in the dunes, and by midsummer the staked-off nests dot the sand from Jupiter down through Boca. Juno Beach, home of the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, is the heart of it.
Morning walkers learn to read the beach like a newspaper: the wide tractor-tread crawl of a nesting female, and later in the season, the tiny scribbled tracks of hatchlings that made their dash to the water overnight. There is no better reason to take your coffee to the sand at sunrise.
If you own — or are buying — oceanfront property, turtle season is also practical knowledge. The beachfront towns enforce lighting rules during nesting months, because hatchlings orient by the light of the horizon. Turtle-friendly fixtures, amber bulbs, and drawn shades after dark aren’t just neighborly; they’re typically required. It’s one of those coastal-ownership details I walk buyers through before closing, not after.
A shoreline that still hosts something this ancient is a shoreline being cared for. It’s one of my favorite things about calling this coast home.
— Joanna