Notes on a Beach House—An Art of Windows

D and Layla on Jockey’s Ridge—photo by William E Evans © 2018

Anything’s buildable, the arrogant architect declares, striking a pose as in The Fountainhead, though he feels it was proven once he’d finished the house done a decade ago perched on a spit of land poking into a cove on Lake Barcroft. D and I had been fortunate to discover a property the previous owners couldn’t make work—though it seemed obvious what was required.

Now, studying a virgin site overlooking Currituck Sound—hard to think of a better place to design a dream.

Admittedly, it’s rash to wax poetic about a project before it’s even started—in Yiddish it’s hutzpah. Yet here’s an opportunity to describe the process of design, or at least the bits and pieces of it one can assemble.

Designing a building is a curious blend of intuition and science. Some decisions are obvious, and others not so much. Idiosyncratic design ticks can either be gifts or handicaps, and it’s not always clear which is which.

Decades past—lifetimes—before my children were born, I wrote an extended scene about a misfit, lost and lonely, spending time in an induced daze in a high airy porch where his best friend finds him. In a tropical place open to the air, a wood framed structure with latticework where glass might be in another clime. The image of the place was so clear—more so than the meandering storyline. The Miami apartment fire saved the world from another fantasy novel.

An Art of Windows

On the Outer Banks, if what you’re chasing are expansive views of the sea, the sound, and what lies between, a spectacular location is Jockey’s Ridge in Nags Head. Sunsets on Jockey’s Ridge blow Key West right out of the water—figuratively—while needing to deal with far fewer grifters.

However, if a tad less than a full panorama is desired, that’s where windows come in. When designing a building, focusing views is the art of envisioning the possible before it’s been built. You won’t know until you stand there. Windows are stage sets for a building’s occupants, only more permanent—no scenery flying in from above, like on Broadway. Even in the age of 3D modeling, it takes visualizing a space before you can begin.  

All this time later, I’m staring at a blank sheet of bumwad and working to recall that Outer Banks ambiance.

Building Program

To begin with, one needs a building program: how many rooms of which type, organized on how many floors. Certain rules of logic apply, some obvious, some not—bedrooms are for sleeping, so views aren’t terribly important unless you plant a telescope at the window. And living rooms are for when you’re awake save for occasional napping—though a sunny deck accomplished that better. If you locate the kitchen by the front door, you’d better be one tidy chief, and the dog bowl will need to go elsewhere; it’s not a house trailer And bathrooms take up more space than you think. So in summary:

+/- 2,250 GSF raised on piers, with parking for one or two cars.

4-5 bedrooms, 3 or 4 bathrooms, with living, dining and kitchen spaces.

Public living spaces to be on top floor for best views.

Open deck off the living spaces and screen porch accessible from kitchen for outdoor dining.

Outdoor shower and lockup for bikes and beach paraphernalia at ground level.

Max height 35’ average above grade per zoning, minimum 15’ side yards, minimum 25’ front and back yards.

Elevator: I’m going to want one sooner or later.

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Easy enough. But if the deck and screen porch are on the top floor, what goes below them? You can see a good many houses with multi-story decks at the beach for that reason alone.

More intrinsic to the interior character are questions like ‘open’ verses ‘traditional,’ and whether a formal dining room is necessary for a beach house. If New Years dinner is to be served to company, perhaps it’s necessary.

And the biggest question is whether to rent the house during the summer months when sanity is strained by the heat and the beach traffic—whether to rent gets to furniture, appliances and finishes. Granite counters aren’t likely to survive past the first few rental seasons. Nor will hardwood floors unless everyone gets automatically hosed down for sand at the entrance, dogs included. Woody Allan’s orgasmatron put to a better use.

Site:

Half acre site roughly 100’ x 170’, with east-west orientation, rising west-to-east from the street to the rear with increasing cross slope toward the rear. Located in Southern Shores, a wider part of the Outer Banks, where only a handful of empty lots remain. Shrub-size live oaks at the edges and toward the rear.

The fringe of young live oaks on the property should be encouraged to grow. Ultimately, if left where they are, the ones at the rear of the site will provide foreground to the abutting property, as will the ones on the north side. At the slow pace of trees, the site will close in eventually, though not in my lifetime. We’ll plant anyway, because that’s the optimism of gardening.

The site has ideal solar orientation.

Rising from the lane as it does, it is deep enough to offer privacy, and sits well above the opposite property.

Within 15 minute walking distance of Duck Village restaurants and stores.

North Dune Loop is a cul-de-sac two lots back from Currituck Sound. No through traffic with a handful of empty lots, one of which sits directly east of the site.

Initial Design Impressions

Of the site’s primary views, east and west, the latter one toward Currituck Sound appears to be the easiest to address. The ocean is much further off toward the east, and when the lot backing up to this one is built on, a good portion of the eastern view likely will be blocked by—worst case—a gauche monster. What views up or down the island will offer depends on the adjacent grades and proximity to neighbors. Facing the street toward the west is likely the best distant view—despite the low angle sun on late summer afternoons.

So does any of this matter if you don’t look out a window or sit on the deck? If you don’t, why build at the beach?

To Take From Tradition?

On Cape Cod, in beach towns like Wellfleet and Chatham, one expects white-washed clapboard salt boxes several stories tall, prim and proper with trimmed boxwood hedges.

When first visiting the Outer Banks in the 70s, there was still a distinct flavor to the houses on the Outer Banks, the gray-to-black of aged cedar at one time gave the Banks a humble face, starting with the single story homes with deep porches and low slung shingled roofs spiked with vertical dormer shapes.

I’m here to testify fifty years ago Carolina carpenters continued a vernacular architecture honoring the Shingle Style so beloved by Vince Scully, the architectural historian of Yale fame. I think about causal links that aren’t written down.

Le Corbusier urged the profession to employ roof decks to replace the footprints of urban housing blocks. He wanted to demo old Paris to prove his theory. The world is gratedul the Parisians said no thank you.

Roof decks imply low-sloped (aka flat) roofs. Green roofs, also low-sloped—are a thing now; I’ve done one of those, though the contractor refused to install the correct growing medium (it’s not Home Depot topsoil). Low-sloped roofs are feasible most anywhere—though on the Outer Banks—with rainfall measured in inches per hour when a storm crawls up the coat searching for roofs to peel loose?

Low slung roofs with overhangs and deep porches is a signature of houses on the Outer Banks. The Gray Ladies of Nags Head are iconic, to use an overwrought term, though what part of that tradition could be captured today?

A local adaption on the Outer Banks, remaining in the 70s, were the slope-back wood benches wrapped in screen, creating slanted screen walls around the porches. They were birdcage-like forms I’ve not seen anywhere else. Sadly, they’re now gone. No one builds deep porches like that any more, as if the local builders have forgotten their own traditions—more likely the developers have. 

Or perhaps a more modern take with less adornment—like the houses on Nova Scotia’s rugged coast by Brian MacKay-Lyons, another of Charlie Moore’s disciple. I admit being drawn to the tight geometries of MacKay-Lyons’s houses, even if Nova Scotia’s weather bears little resemblance to the Outer Banks, save perhaps for high winds. I suspect Charlie would insist on adopting the local traditions.

There are also Lake Flato’s houses to use for reference—Texas gets heavy rains at times, but they don’t raise their houses on stilts in the tradition of the Outer Banks.

So the search for forms begins.