Lucy the Tugboat

A beloved family tugboat, renovated for life at sea

This is a special design project by The Brooklyn Home Company’s design duo, Creative Director Lyndsay Caleo Karol, and her husband and Artist-in-Residence, Fitzhugh Karol.

The project aptly named LUCY (after their beloved family dog) is a 1980s Lord Nelson Victory tugboat, which they thoughtfully renovated to be a floating home for their family of four. When Caleo Karol saw a 49-foot Lord Nelson Victory tugboat with her father on Canandaigua Lake, where she spent summers as kid, she was immediately inspired to find her own. As founders of The Brooklyn Home Company, the couple was familiar with renovating homes on land but never anything like this that had to be ready for high seas. In 2015, they found Lucy in Stonington, Maine and it was love at first sight.

After redoing the electrical from scratch (and adding flushing toilets), the couple turned to the fun part: refinishing the traditional teak and holly floors and painting the interiors in Farrow & Ball’s Schoolhouse White. They also added stunning Workstead sconces and lighting. Other renovations highlights included re-creating the main cabin to include a comfortable and storage savvy kitchen and living room (with a custom brass bar for their favorite spirits), creating a third bedroom in the pilot house behind the captain’s seat and a teak roof deck on top for entertaining with a swim ladder, an outdoor shower, and steel arms for hammocks. The bedrooms and bathrooms were designed with as much storage as possible so the rooms felt like cozy nooks that everything could be stored way.

Every winter, the family takes off to the Bahamas and Florida. In the summer, they travel down to Charleston to Long Island, or down the coast of Maine where it all started. They even have sleepovers on Lucy, right in the Brooklyn marina. Their kids learned to walk on Lucy and it’s their family’s happy place on the water.