This essay originally appeared in the July 2004 issue of Clem Labine’s Period Homes Architecture can be likened to a tree: It has historical roots. It has many branches. And the roots provide nourishment to the living branches. History is…
near Boston, Massachusetts
Description Traditional design meets net-zero technology in a new house Site Suburban street, west of Boston Design Greek-Revival style exterior with modern aesthetics through a thoughtfully curated color palette, furnishings, and custom millwork. The design prioritized both efficiency and comfort,…
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Massachusetts coast
The existing sheds act as a gate lodge for the house. A covered arcade, in a similar vernacular to the sheds, leads through a courtyard to the new house.
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The first soft-pencil doodle for a new house starts in plan as a bubble diagram and begins to take shape as a building. Basic relationships of rooms are established, with thought to the way you move through the site, from cars at the road, through a gateway, into a garden, and through the house toward the water.
The diagram takes on more specificity, with further delineation of rooms, furniture within those rooms, and planting in the sheltered entry garden, which is integral to the house that wraps around it.
The road-facing elevation sketch shows the idea of the “gate lodge,” which centers an otherwise asymmetrical composition, gives more presence to a small house, and enhances the experience of moving from public toward private spaces. References to the American Shingle Style blend with nods to Edwin Lutyens, whose work was receiving renewed attention with an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London at the time of this design (1981).
An early perspective sketch of the living room explores decorative possibilities. The note “geometric peacock” (which appears upside down) is a search for a metaphor on which to base the design.
A floor plan, roof plan, and thumbnail bird’s-eye perspective on one page describe an early scheme for a house that pinwheels around an octagonal tower. The barn-like vernacular of the design incorporates a reference to the turrets of our client’s grandparents’ Victorian seaside house that had been lost to fire. As with most of our work, the roof plan is a key to figuring out how the design works in three dimensions.
In the late 1970s we, along with others, were excited to discover the Classical tradition, which had been suppressed in architectural education in the post-World War II period. We set out to educate ourselves by studying and drawing the Classical Orders and putting names to all the parts and pieces. 
This study, which has continued over the years, gave us fluency in the use of moldings such as the detail sketch of the top and bottom of a stair newel post. The sketch is a kind of shorthand on the way to a more complete drawing.
An interior perspective sketch gives clients a sense of how they might live in a room. This one was part of a series that presented, with watercolor, alternative color schemes. 
Ideas can come at the lunch table as well as at the desk, and paper napkins are there to record them. 
An interior elevation helps us figure out how to make a coherent composition of the various elements—doors, windows, or stairs—on each wall. For this renovation of an apartment with a high living room we introduced a grid in which some of the sections are solid wall panels, some are cabinets or bookshelves, and some are open to a partially concealed stairway.