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Building & Craftsmanship
Going with the Grain
By Donna Scaglione
Photography by Patrick Wiseman
A Chatham home finds its personality
in the finer points of design.
Wood, with all its inherent warmth and character, is the heart of this gambrel-roof house on Little Mill Pond in Chatham. Hard-pine floors, some of which include reclaimed beams, shine in the sun. Layered molding in milled poplar draws the eye upward toward intricately grooved ceilings. Custom built-in wooden shelves hold dozens of family photos and souvenirs from beachcombing expeditions. Painted beadboard walls add visual appeal.
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| Antique heart pine floors from Cataumet Sawmill run throughout the house. The front entryway's stair railing, hand-carved by Richard Hark of Harwich, ends in a curved fish design (opposite). |
Wood is also used as the base for artful touches, such as carved horseshoe crabs on a fireplace mantel and a staircase railing with a fish head etched into its cherry surface.
The careful use of wood gives the house a cozy feel, even with a large floor plan––at least 4,500 square feet––and modern amenities such as built-ins for large screen TVs. The end result is a house with the soul of a Cape Cod sea captain’s home, complete with water views, a widow’s walk, high ceilings with layered moldings, and stunning carved woodwork.
“It was important that you feel you are in a country house, that you’re on Cape Cod,” says the homeowner, who worked closely with Chatham builder Rick Roy to get the look and feel he wanted. “That’s why there are horseshoe crabs carved into the fireplace. We’re not lovers of Germanic design. My idea of houses on the Cape is funky.” The homeowner credits Roy for his painstaking attention to detail, particularly in his effort to bridge the span of time through craftsmanship.
Roy says he wanted to capture the handsome, spacious elegance found in many antique sea captains’ homes on Cape Cod. “One of the themes [the owner] wanted to use in keeping with the older-style captains’ houses was higher ceilings with lots of molding,” he explains. Indeed, in some places, like the kitchen, the molding is triple layered with picture molding on the bottom, beaded casing in the middle, and crown molding on the top. “The more texture you get, the warmer the house feels,” says the owner.
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| In the living room, a Kravet sofa and PierceMartin wicker chairs are paired with a luxurious Tibetan rug by Steven King. |
Dana King of Crown Woodworking in Chatham was responsible for many of the home’s exquisite built-ins and cabinets, including all the bathroom vanities and a wet bar in a first-floor hallway. “There is a tremendous amount of wood in the house,” King observes. “The owners wanted the house to have a cottage feel to it.”
On the kitchen cabinets, King used traditional butt hinges and one-inch-thick inset doors with beaded face frames. And the fireplace mantels feature carvings reminiscent of the natural world, like the King-designed sunburst frieze, along with the horseshoe crabs. Since the owner is a sports-fishing enthusiast, King designed an eight-drawer fly-tying station in the upstairs office. The drawers are styled after those an architect would use––long and flat to store blueprints––or in this case, scissors, hooks, and fishing line.
The house’s gambrel roof creates eaves in many of the rooms, including the office, and Roy hasn’t let any of this added space go to waste. The homeowner’s 10-foot-long desk is built into an eave, as is the fly-tying station. “We took advantage of every corner,” says Roy.
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| Open to the living room and breakfast nook (right), the kitchen (above) is perfect for cooking while enjoying garden and water views. Custom cabinets by Dana King are paired with honed Carrera marble countertops and a colorful marble mosaic backsplash from Urban Archeology. |
Enveloped by windows overlooking the gardens, the breakfast nook mixes rustic touches such as a brick floor and a table by Tom Huckman of Enterprise Machine Co. made out of glass, brass, and an antique sugar cane grinder. |
Murals painted by New York artist Adam Cvijanovic add color and movement to the off-white walls in the dining room and master bedroom. The dining room mural is a narrative of sorts: underneath a winter sky, a WWII plane has crashed into icy mountains, and survivors are trekking through the snow.
“We did not want something cute, but we did want something that has a similar palette to that of water,” the homeowner explains.
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| To mask the master bedroom’s necessary support columns, builder Rick Roy used them as part of the bed's built-in headboard. The inset coffered ceiling provided a playful spot for Cvijanovic's mural of Stage Harbor. |
Cvijanovic painted the mural in the master bedroom based on photos the homeowner took of nearby Stage Harbor. The artist painted both murals in his studio on Tyvek paper and carefully installed them at the house as if they were wallpaper.
As Roy and the homeowner discuss the house, its intimate, old-home feel pops up frequently in the conversation. “We didn’t want to build a new house,” says the homeowner, who summers in the home with his wife and two sons. “We didn’t want to feel drywall. We really wanted something that had a more classic feel than what builders build today. We wanted a lot of detail.”
And he got it. A mason spent a day and a half banging dents into the fireplace bricks to give them an antique look. The heating and air conditioning grates are made of wood, not metal. Also, there are no bi-fold doors anywhere. “What we didn’t want was a hospital-type feel, a clean, sterile house,” the owner says.
In keeping with this vision, designer Susan Tuttle of Surroundings, Inc. in Orleans used airy, seaside palettes to give the home added warmth and an elegance that complements the homeowners’ appreciation for the unconventional. In the family room, just feet away from a custom-built coffee table filled with sand, sea glass, and bits of shell, a series of astronaut paintings crown the fireplace to vibrant effect. “My wife and I intentionally chose pieces that weren’t typical of a Cape Cod house,” says the homeowner. Throughout the home, striking portraits and unexpected pieces, such as a shark formed from scraps of welded steel, take the place of the traditional landscapes more often found in Cape homes.
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Horseshoe crabs lend a playful touch to the family room's fireplace surround, handcrafted by Dana King. A unique glass coffee table holds sand, shells, and other beachcombing finds gathered by the family over time. |
“We’ve been collecting stuff for years. I’m blown away by people who build houses and fill them with art in three weeks,” says the homeowner. “This house is based on the idea of meaningful clutter. You play with things when you’re putting them up. You have fun with it. Items migrate through the house and find their place eventually.”
Like many rooms in the home, the family room is filled with windows and opens to an outside deck. “If you’re in a summer house, the essence of it is being outdoors,” the owner says. “The idea here was to give maximum ability to be outside. Because there is so much window space, you live, visually, outside.”
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| Tongue-and-groove pine planking acts as ceiling material in the boys' bedroom, while white-painted poplar lines the walls. |
The family room leads to an open kitchen and a breakfast nook, where window-lined walls surround a table and chairs. Just outside is a custom-built outdoor spa encircled by tall sea grass, part of the carefully designed landscape created by Craig Panaccione of Crossroads Landscape & Pools in Orleans.
“When we talk about living here,” the homeowner says, “we all agree that the landscaping is such an important part of this house. There are four distinct areas for sitting, and they all feel different at different times of day. They act as multiple conversation areas.”
Outside and in, the home was built with even the smallest detail in mind; not surprisingly, the project took over two years to complete. “There was a lot of give and take, back and forth,” says Roy, noting the strong collaboration between all of the major design contributors.
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| An open-air porch below one of the second floor's multiple balconies overlooks Little Mill Pond in the distance. |
In the end, from the intricate stonework in the outside living areas to the glass-topped table custom-designed from a sugar cane grinder, this is a house that reflects attention to craft—an elegant, finely shaped space with all of the substance and character of a true Cape Cod home.
Rick Roy Construction, LLC • S. Chatham, MA • 508-432-6840
www.rickroyconstruction.com
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