The Outer Cape of Massachusetts—that slender hook of land that bends north to separate the Atlantic from Cape Cod Bay—has been drawing creatives of one kind or another for almost a century, if not longer. Starting in the late 1930s, some of the most interesting minds in America built summer houses, painting studios, and beach shacks here, dotted amid scrubby oaks and pitch pines, down sandy tracks that wound between kettle ponds formed by retreating ice sheets some 18,000 years ago. The Hungarian- German architect Marcel Breuer built his summer home here, followed by painter James Lechay and the Russian- born British writer, industrial designer, architect and academic Serge Chermayeff. Florence and Hans Knoll, the Saarinens, and Walter Gropius all rented houses here through the years—a latter-day Bauhaus on the Beach.
Perhaps the best known local figure was the architect Hayden Walling, whose present-day fame rests largely on two houses: the Halprin House and Studio, its simple frame of two-by-fours filled with floor-to-ceiling glass, and the project he built for Lechay, with its raked roofline and angled outer wall. Iconic projects both. So you can imagine my delight when our clients from Kentucky managed to acquire the home that Walling built for himself in the late 1930s and called us. With its steep gables and clapboard siding, the house predates the architect’s shift toward a more hard-lined modernism. All houses speak if we listen, and this one demanded that we tread lightly so as not to destroy its unusual, transitional spirit.
Of course, the program needed to change in some fundamental ways to accommodate the needs of the family. Children were transitioning into young adulthood, so the parents were beginning to think of adapting to as-yet-unknown futures: jobs, partners, children. We brought on the New York–based architect Malachi Connolly, also board president for Cape Cod Modern House Trust. His years of experience working in the region gave him direct access to many of the region’s best modern houses for inspiration, including Walling’s. Working with Malachi, we designed a new guest house, sited away from the original structure but close enough to be integrated into the shared life of the building. And while the family’s homes in Kentucky leaned into their more eclectic tendencies, here on the Cape, with a heritage of Pilgrim austerity and that rich and rigorous intellectual history, we made rooms that would feel neither old nor new, just simple and natural. These would be spaces for sandy feet and hastily made beds and kitchen sinks stacked with lunch dishes left behind because the beach suddenly called. That’s the kind of house it wanted to be.
To me, a summer house is ruined the moment it feels winterized, robbed of that gleeful sense of a fleeting, weightless season. Of course, houses do need to withstand extremes in weather—the trick is making them feel as if they might not. To strike that balance, we chose homasote across the project, a cellulose fiberboard used widely since the 1920s. Walling had used it originally as well. Richly textured and humble, with a fantastic ability to absorb sound, it seemed essential to the house’s easy, no-fuss energy. The furniture throughout— armchairs by Charlotte Perriand and Eero Saarinen, a rare standing lamp by Ettore Sottsass, an original FJ-55 chair by Finn Juhl—gestures toward Walling’s future turn toward high modernism without (I hope!) falling into the trap of looking like a fetishistic mod-style film set. To achieve that meant repurposing what was already there, resisting the urge to “fix” things and, instead, leaving traces of what came before. That’s the challenge and the joy of a project like this: creating a sense of history inside the house that can match the real history of its bones, the sense of a life built gradually over the course of a half-century. It’s not just preparing for the future, it’s also caring for the past.
