Beach House, Spring 2024

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4 | Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Spring 2024 Five Perennials for Your Outer Cape Pollinator Garden Bee Balm Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) offers rounded clusters of small bright orange flowers that honeybees feast on in August. It is an important host plant for monarch butterflies. Unlike most milkweeds, its leaves are alternate, and it lacks the plant’s typical milky sap. Butterfly weed is rugged and will grow in dry, sandy soil. There are many types of milkweed but this one is not invasive like the common variety Asclepias syriaca. Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) has flower spikes that look like fuzzy upright caterpillars the color of lavender. It blooms at intervals throughout the summer. This is a member of the mint family, though it seems to be easier to contain than common culinary mints. It has square stems and licorice- scented foliage — something rabbits and deer don’t love. It thrives in heat and is tolerant of drought and poor soils. Anise Hyssop Bee Balm comes in many colors, but the shorter pink bradburiana or Eastern version is a boon for bees because it blooms earlier in summer. It’s also a clumping species so won’t send runners to fill a whole border the way the later- blooming scarlet ones (Monarda didyma) will. Once established, these don’t need much attention, but they’re not as drought- tolerant as other plants on this list. Give them space and morning sun because they’re also susceptible to powdery mildew. The bonus: they attract hummingbirds. Sweet Pepperbush Butterfly Weed Seaside Goldenrod Goldenrod sends up its luscious, deep yellow, arching clusters of flowers in late summer; it is a good supplier of pollen for bees provisioning their nests and nectar for butterflies preparing for their fall migrations. It’s adapted to drought and poor soils and is deer resistant. And contrary to popular belief, it do not cause hay fever: the culprit is common ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia, which often grows near goldenrod. Clumping forms include Showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) and Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens). Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia) is a suckering shrub you’ll come across in partly shaded wetlands here. Look on the wooded edges of ponds for swaths of their white spire blooms starting in mid- July to early August. If you have the right spot, they’ll reward you with their spicysweet perfume. They’ll reward your neighborhood’s honeybees, too. When their nectar flows, Wellfleet beekeeper John Portnoy says his apiary becomes a “honey factory.” His sweet pepperbush honey is harvested after the bees have feasted and put up sufficient fall supplies. — The Editors Everything you need for a gorgeous garden from specialty soils to seeds, tools, and even wheelbarrows for your harvests Get growing at 4205 State Hwy., Eastham (508) 255-7155 Giving Form to Sustainable Living a l i n e a r c h i t e c t u r e i n c 100 & 101 Route 6A Orleans, MA 02653 508-240-6500 alinearchitecure.com
Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Spring 2024 | 5 The Nature of the Beach House The impromptu quality of the modernists’ seaside getaways may be a thing of the past, but three architects say a connection with nature is still their primary pursuit Angles at the Round House in Wellfleet, architect Joy Cuming’s reinterpretation of a house designed in the 1970s by Charlie Zehnder. (Photo by Roe Osborn, courtesy Aline Architecture) By Teresa Parker Beach houses have evolved since the modernists built their getaways on Outer Cape Cod starting in the late 1930s. But their work is still present in the minds of today’s designers. We asked three architects working here — Paul Krueger, Joy Cuming, and Mark Hammer — to tell us what the words “beach house” mean to them. Krueger designed his first Outer Cape house in 1966 soon after he served, fresh out of school, as project manager on Harvard’s Carpenter Center — on which Le Corbusier teamed with Josep Lluis Sert. They were looking for someone “without preconceived notions of how things are done,” according to Peter Mc- Mahon and Christine Cipriani’s book Cape Cod Modern. Krueger’s Mark house in Truro is a reimagining of Provincetown’s fishermen’s shacks crossed with Le Corbusierian sculpturalism. Only 12 feet wide, floating above a moor on pilings, it is at once a rustic cabin and edgy artwork. Cuming has been designing and building houses on the Outer Cape for 30 years, starting out with the late Alan Dodge, who had worked with the self- taught midcentury modern builder Charlie Zehnder. Now she has her own firm, Aline Architects Studio in Orleans. “I don’t think so much about style as I do about what I’m relating to, what the site suggests,” says Cuming. “Modernism allows quite a lot of freedom to explore materials and the relationship of a building to its environment.” In his 20 years working here, Hammer says he has always felt a connection between contemporary design and the modernist experiments that dot our woods. “Our work is very much informed by our forebears who built the modern houses here,” he says of his Cambridge- based Hammer Architects. “We are connected by the desire to build a house that feels like it fits in, and where the sun and wind inform the design.” Q: Tell us about your own ideal “beach house.” The Mark House, built in Truro in 1966, was architect Paul Krueger’s first on the Outer Cape. Referencing both Provincetown fishermen’s shacks and Le Corbusier, it is only 12 feet wide. (Photo by Steve Rosenthal, courtesy Krueger Associates) “I would have to say my ideal is a tent,” says Paul Krueger from the Cambridge office of Krueger Associates. On trips to Wellfleet with his young family in the 1960s, “we always camped at the Audubon sanctuary. It was only gradually that we started to talk about wanting something a little sturdier than those canvas walls.” For him, what’s fundamental is that a beach house provides immediacy with nature. Joy Cuming also thinks of the seasons she spent living close to the elements — including on a boat in Provincetown Harbor. She has no single mental image of what a beach house should look like; it might be one in a row of little cottages or a freeform space under a curved roof that follows the undulations of the dunes. “Its forms and shapes emerge from the contours of the place,” she says. Whatever its shape, though, “a beach house should be a place where the materials feel at home on the site. The house needs to feel like it’s meant to be there. A house that touches down lightly would be my ideal.” “I think ‘beach house’ is kind of an odd term for the Outer Cape, since not many houses are right on the beach here,” says Mark Hammer: “ ‘Seaside’ is a better term.” His own house in Truro overlooks a valley, not the water, which, he says, is “everywhere close enough.” Although the houses he builds often include expanses of glass, he says he’s not always trying to capture views: “The ideal is about a connection to nature, and especially about being able to enjoy natural light.” Q. You’ve all been designing houses on the Outer Cape for many years. How have beach houses evolved? “There is a real change in the kinds of materials people are looking for,” says Cuming. “They are more aware of the scarcity of materials we once thought were in abundant supply.” The use of heat- treated wood, electric radiant heat, and all the technical details affect the way you build a house, she says. Kreuger has watched beach houses grow larger and in some ways more serious — the cost of materials is part of what has driven a desire for permanence, he says. Hammer agrees. “Twenty years ago we were able to build more continued on page 6
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Beach House, Spring 2024

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