Introduction—Architecture by the Sea

Whether captivated by an island’s carefree attitude, warm temperatures, diverse residents, or simply caught in the trance of the ocean’s changing tides, island and coastal living offer that extra finesse to life that is hard to find elsewhere. It’s undeniable why many people navigate their way to a waterfront home. To imagine the perfect getaway is easy, but to design and build it to its maximum potential demands the requisite professional experiences, which we discuss in detail below.

With a deep commitment to craft and the creation of dramatic yet functional spaces, MMA tailors each client’s desires into a uniquely expressive and signature home or estate. Morehouse MacDonald has had the opportunity to work with clients from the United States, Europe, and Africa to deliver superior architectural services in St Kitts and Nevis.

Our creative process begins with the client, who communicates needs and desires, which we then translate into a written and clear architectural program. Listening is our first most critical skill at this stage. We then move onto analyzing a chosen site or help clients directly in the site selection process. We look carefully at the site’s natural features and draw upon them for design inspiration; we pay particular attention to the richness of the visual as we search for ways to awaken power views through the lens of architectural spaces. And we explore a locality’s architectural history, character, materiality, and building traditions as part of our overall design solutions. The results of our work can be seen here:

The Architectural Process—Building on St Kitts and Nevis

As we discuss in “Design Visa: Why MMA’s Clients Take Us Abroad,” MMA has built up a solid track record with a key building partner in Bennett Hofford Construction, who has assisted us in our earlier projects on St Kitts and continues to play a key role in our current endeavors at Christophe Harbour. Together as architect and builder, we have built up complementary skill sets in design and construction ideally suited for projects in the Caribbean.

Our Current Experiences on St Kitts and Nevis

On our first project inside Christophe Harbour we were challenged by a client who sought out a design that was both responsive to the site’s abundant views and orientations while seeking a more European sense of scale and refinement—all under roof lines that are typical of Caribbean architecture.

We enthusiastically embraced what seemed like deeply contradictory design goals to arrive at a home that stands apart yet still belongs to the generalized vision of Christophe Harbour architecture. Hip roofs are sheathed in warm, soft terracotta tiles while stucco walls embrace a more lively mix of warm peachy tones. Regional coral stone intermixed with dark brown timbers at roof edges while large glass openings adjoin expansive terraces facing the ocean.

MMA’s first project at Christophe Harbour was directly responsive to the client’s interest in European influences.

If our first project at Christophe Harbour presented unique challenges in balancing materiality and architectural language on a beachfront property, our next project on St Kitts would demand an analytical and strategic approach to site design work out on Cardinal Point.

With views across Sandy Bank Bay, our client tasks MMA with delivering a design that met their unique lifestyle while creating a home that embraced both the ocean-facing views and the inherent tranquillity offered by facing the mountain on the opposite side. Unique to this home on a hillside is the creation of an internalized garden for yoga and meditation that still remains connected to the presence of the ocean on the opposite side. To achieve this required a deft arrangement of space creation at multiple levels while still maintaining reasonable engineering and construction program along the mountain.

The Cardinal Point house—shown at the top of our post – is currently under construction and will be completed in November of 2018.

These few projects are a limited showing of MMA’s work in St Kitts and Nevis and we are excited to have been chosen as a Preferred Architect program at Christophe Harbour.

Related Projects

Caribbean Villa in Nevis

The sky is blue, an impossibly bright shade of blue that is just about the only thing to tip you off that the house is not in England. It is grand and rambling, unfolding across the lawns in a wonderfully earthy sprawl of rustic charm. Stately like it has been there for centuries, the kind of place that is owned by a duke or an earl and is profoundly aware of that fact. The grass is a luminous green with bright blooms of flowers, and rust-red shrubs off to the side exude the professionally kept yet slightly rumpled appearance of a courtly English garden. It is the kind of house whose surroundings you instinctively call the grounds rather than the yard.

A renovation is a tricky balancing act that boils down to a core tenet: respect the original while introducing change. It is crucial at this stage to identify which elements are integral parts of the existing style and which are merely ancillary. If you remove the central pieces, the style will lose its visual clarity as a style distinct from its predecessors and its followers. Similar logic goes into adapting a book into a film; certain elements are essential to the storyline, while others can disappear and leave the story structurally sound. The task of the movie producer is to recognize which are the former and which the latter. This is the task of the architect as well. We must recognize that in this case, art is not just in what we change, but in what we allow to stay the same.

It is a running theme at MMA that our projects can often be distilled to a marriage of two styles, two ideas, two origins. At its core, this is a discussion of checks and balances in the middle of a vast gray area. It is a discussion of how to show respect to both pieces, how to know what is indispensable, and how to find a creative way to make something new out of them. None of our projects exists in a vacuum: each is the combined result of every design we have studied and created over many years of practice. We aim not only to avoid falling too heavily upon yesterday’s tropes but also to honor their value and embrace their place in the progression of architecture as an art. We do this with the hope that what we create will have both roots in tradition and branches outward toward something new that we cannot quite see yet. We hope we have done this, and we hope you find it beautiful.

Shingle-style architecture is a uniquely American brand that marks a point of convergence for several different influences from Queen Anne Victorian to Medieval Romanesque. A popular New England style that appeared just as the nineteenth century wound to a close, shingle-style architecture paints a sweeping portrait of the nation at that point in time: high fashion with an edge of eclecticism and a bent for asymmetry. In retrospect, what could have better ushered in the roaring 20s, with its love of glamorous oddities and modern twists on the tried-and-true?

The Isaac Bell House is a National Historic Landmark built during America’s Gilded Age. Also known as Edna Villa, this outstanding example of shingle-style architecture is located in Newport, Rhode Island.

Celebrated as the architecture of the American summer, this style lends itself well to metaphor. Stone foundations emerge from the bedrock as a verisimilar root system, tying the house to sturdy tradition at its base while allowing it to grow bolder as it ascends. With Palladian windows, neoclassical ornament, and wide, elegant porches, a subtle eclecticism suffuses the home. The primarily wooden construction unifies the shingle-style home with its surroundings so the more asymmetrical elements can shine without undermining the home’s stylistic integrity.

Kragsyde Mansion was an iconic shingle-style estate built in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts in 1883 and demolished in 1929. The rambling house was designed by the premier Boston architectural firm of Peabody & Sterns for a wealthy Boston client.

Variety adorns the top of the shingle-style home as well, where it caps off with complex roof forms, towers blended into a continuous roofline, and gable dormers in late-Victorian fashion. Curved walls sometimes replace tower structures to expand interior space and add visual interest to the exterior.

H. H. Richardson’s William Watts Sherman House in Newport, Rhode Island, is generally acknowledged as one of the American architect’s great masterpieces and a prototype of shingle-style architecture.

Gone are the ornate details that delicately adorned the Victorian homes of the 1800s. Applied decoration gives way to greater structural variety: complex forms wrapped in cedar shingles, gambrel roofs, grand windows opening onto balconies. The cedar shingles tie the diverse forms together to ensure the asymmetry does not topple out of proportion and create something altogether discordant. On the contrary, the resplendent final product reflects the American spirit while evoking the slow and romantic lifestyle of the Victorian era.

MMA’s Shingle-Style Country House represents our 21st-century take on this storied architectural tradition. Another project in this style is in the works in the western suburbs of Boston; take a look at the rendering below and check back for updates as this project unfolds.

Preliminary rendering of a project with shingle-style influences on the boards at MMA now.

In terms of classic New England architecture, the traditional Cape Cod home is a time-honored standard. Built to provide shelter from the vicious winter storms that whipped in off the Atlantic, these homes have remained popular due to their charming simplicity and the nostalgic element of tradition that suffuses them. They are uniquely New England. With modern technology on our side, MMA set out to create a modern Cape house that captures the essence of the original while bringing it into the 21st century.

More than any stylistic preference, the 21st century denotes sustainability. Located on a stunning sloped site on the mid-Cape, our award-winning modern Cape house incorporates Ipê, a hard and resilient wood sustainably harvested in Bolivia. While the material breaks from tradition compared to older Cape homes, the structure retains some key similarities: the clean, symmetrical lines; the white details balanced against earthy neutrals; the materials a direct reflection of the natural surroundings.

Technology allows us to make even greater adaptations to our modern Cape house. Traditional Cape homes feature small windows to better withstand biting winds and brutal snowstorms, but modern tempered glass can resist such forces with relative ease. MMA situated the muntins along the top edge of the window panes to allow for uninterrupted views of the ocean and beyond. In conjunction with the larger and more prevalent windows, we also added dormers to increase the lighting in the home, connecting inside and out.

Such alterations would have severely hampered the day-to-day lives of Cape residents two hundred years ago, if only because the abundance of windows would have let in too much light and air. Blackout shades account for the issue of privacy—and early-morning sunlight—that might arise, but insulation was the chief concern. HVAC and chillers allow us to keep the spacious interior of this home warm in the winter months and cool in the blazing summers.

It is in those pristine Cape Cod summers that this home truly shines. Airy open floor plans extend the illusion that inside and outside have melded together, creating an elegant, summery space for everyday living and entertaining. The first floor opens out onto a wide, curving deck, where every angle grants graceful panoramic views of the Atlantic. Large, shady overhangs protect the viewer from direct sunlight while allowing them to feel the sea breeze, breathe in the fresh ocean air, and experience the outdoors.

Because here is the crux of our modern Cape: it is the same Cape Cod you know and love—the same unmatchable blue skies, the same clean simplicity, the same historical underpinnings. When we set out to adapt a style through a modern lens, we always strive to alter only in order to elevate the style, while holding sacred the core attributes that made the original worth emulating.

When an MMA client uses our services again and again, it is validation on both a personal and artistic level, and for us it is the highest compliment.

Not long ago we had the good fortune to work with longstanding clients on another of their homes. The couple had visited and become captivated by the Cotswolds, a rural area of south central England known for its stone-built villages, historical towns and stately homes and gardens. When they moved to Newport, their hope was to find a way to recreate all that they loved about the English countryside in a home here and, while looking, they were intrigued by a cottage they found situated on the grounds of an old estate. They engaged our services so together we could articulate their desire to live in their own bit of the Cotswolds on this side of the pond.

Converting a Kennel

Our first thought upon viewing this project was that we would need to respect the pedigree of the existing structure while renovating the building in a way that added beauty and functionality to an already charmed existence. The property had an interesting history: at one time the cottage had actually been used as a kennel—housing more than 40 prized Pekingese dogs belonging to the estate’s owner.

The main house of the estate sits several hundred yards away, providing the cottage a respectable measure of privacy. The cottage itself rests on several acres which include stone ruins, beautiful landscaping and peacocks that continue to roam and guard the property, emitting their distinctive calls when feeling threatened. This fairytale setting was initially designed to look and feel like the English countryside. Given that the existing architecture of the entire estate was English manor house in nature, it was a perfect marriage (and opportunity.)

The clients’ wish list was a complete renovation; they wanted the master bedroom moved to the first floor, a new kitchen, guest room, study, living area, dining area, and greenhouse. Our plan would need to accommodate all of these requirements while making sure the additions were in keeping with the structure’s original architectural vocabulary.

As with any historic restoration, one of the first challenges was matching existing materials to those whose provenance was more than 100 years old. Our client was adamant, for example, that we both match and preserve the existing clay roofing tile on the house. Finding clay roofing tiles that would match a tile created in the 1800’s meant us finding artisans who continue to craft and create tiles that way today. Working and moving about the landscape without disrupting the vegetation (or disturbing the peacocks) meant another level of care needed to be factored into the project.

How We Began—Process

We began to craft our architectural and design solutions incorporating the known challenges and utilizing a team of craftspeople whose work we knew would meet the standards of this project. The existing structure—the main cottage—had spectacular original details such as exposed timber and joinery that we wanted to preserve and echo in the new structures.

Our design solution was to leave the main cottage intact and build additional structures that would bookend the existing cottage, all the while maintaining the English cottage look and feel. Because we could never match 100-year-old tile with such wear and weathered character entirely, the adjoining structures were roofed in standing seam lead-coated copper, creating a complimentary counter-point that remained in keeping with English architecture. Our general contractor perfectly matched existing stucco walls, while new energy-efficient windows and doors unified the whole home.

The Team

We were able to enlist artisans and experts in the preservation, restoration, and re-creation of historic details. We used Ludowici for the clay tiles, which beautifully replicated and blended in with the original roofing. We worked with the master builder, Kirby Perkins, who realized our collective vision with unmatched craftsmanship, and Michael Coutu, from the award-winning Sudbury Design Group, was instrumental in enriching the landscape design. The interior designer on the project was Pat Lescalleet of Killingsworth & Co. Interiors, in Concord.

This team worked seamlessly and tirelessly to create the clients’ ‘new’ Cotswold manor – no easy feat given the precise nature of the requirements, but the results speak for themselves. This is a cottage to the manor born.

Learn more about our services and how we can help design your dream home or renovate your existing home. Call us at: 1(781) 861-9500