A Playful Retreat
This Cape Cod house is designed for relaxing days at the beach.
The parcel, nestled just behind a dune -- a chip shot from Nantucket Sound -- had a million-dollar view, a ramshackle 1960s ranch, and good odds that someone would come along and raise up a trophy house as high and wide as codes allowed.
That was before Mark and Marianne Townsend bought the Popponesset Beach property and teamed up with Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders of Chatham and Osterville to replace the dark and dingy ranch with a graceful vacation home that dovetails perfectly with neighboring mixed-size houses. Part understated Queen Anne, part Arts and Crafts, part Shingle Style -- and part Swiss chalet -- it is exactly what the owners had in mind. "We asked our architects for a house that was as playful as an afternoon at the beach, followed by a cookout," says Marianne Townsend, "a house that reflected a lack of formality in layout and with lightheartedness in details."
Architects Peter Polhemus and John DaSilva and builder Len Savery gave the Framingham couple and their two teenage children just that. "Natural light was very important in the design, and all the major rooms have windows on at least two sides," says DaSilva, principal designer of the house. That means both longer periods of sunlight and maximum connection with the ocean views. Porches and mahogany decks hug both stories, further drawing the outside in.
The first floor has an irregular layout that makes the kitchen the focal point, with its long work island set diagonally to the dining and living spaces. A curved exterior wall at the back of the dining room softens the geometry of the house and mimics the natural contours of the dunes just outside the windows.
The palette -- six shades of blue and several buffs and sandy tones -- used by Pat Westgate, an interior-design specialist with Classic Kitchens and Interiors of Hyannis, mirrors the hues of the dunes, water, and sky and changes as light and shadows shift during the day.
"The layout and color create a movement -- a revolving feel -- and that's what the Townsends wanted," says DaSilva. "They didn't want to feel as if they were in a static indoors."
Relaxed, easy, informal, and friendly were how his clients described the kind of house they were looking for. "A beach house, not a palace" became a kind of mantra.
That prompted DaSilva to incorporate whimsical touches. An oversize copper finial sits like a party hat on a cupola whose shaft extends down from the peak of the roof through the second-story hallway and right into the kitchen. The architect exaggerated the shingled Victorian brackets that support the porches, "giving them a twinkle in the eye." A smattering of 10-by-10-inch windows on the curved dining room wall creates dappled shadows on the floors and table. Pairs of rounded, ornamental appendages on porch ceilings at the doorways "give a little trumpet flourish to the entryways."
The Townsends also wanted a maintenance-free home -- "especially looking ahead into our retirement years," says Mark, the vice president of a software company. The exterior is paint-free, featuring Eastern white cedar walls; trim, porch ceilings, and roof were done in Western red cedar; and decks were built from plantation-grown, renewable mahogany. All will weather to a mellow silvery-gray. Windows and doors have baked-on enamel finishes that need no maintenance, and a gravel drainage system around the perimeter of the house eliminates the need for gutters and downspouts that would require annual cleaning.
The landscape firm Hawk Design of Charlestown used only indigenous and hearty beach-loving plants to create an environment that takes care of itself without fuss or fertilizer. Working with the local conservation commission, the Townsends removed the invasive species on the 17,500-square-foot parcel and replaced them with indigenous meadow grasses and shrubs such as bearberry, beach plum, and heather, and trees such as flowering dogwood, Robusta juniper, American holly, and pitch pine.
"So even with a brand new home and all the excavation," says J.T. Newton, project manager at Hawk Design, "in the end, the dune and surrounding flood zone [are] restored to a better and healthier condition than before the work began."
On an Indian summer morning as Mark and Marianne plan their inaugural Thanksgiving dinner with the family, they are eager to share the sunrises and moonrises on Nantucket Sound, the whoosh of the surf at night, the way the rocking chair on the porch moves by itself in the wind, and the red fox that visits the deck and befuddles Ollie, their little dog.
Says Mark, "We intend to be here, too, for a long, long time."
John Budris lives on Martha's Vineyard and is the editor of halloffamemagazine.com. E-mail him at johnbudris@hofmagazine.com. 