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Beach House, Spring 2024

This special issue of the Provincetown Independent nudges us into spring on Outer Cape Cod — into the landscape of beach plums and bees; into ceramicists' studios and artists' interiors and gardens; and off on a quest for beach houses where sun and wind inform design.

This special issue of the Provincetown Independent nudges us into spring on Outer Cape Cod — into the landscape of beach plums and bees; into ceramicists' studios and artists' interiors and gardens; and off on a quest for beach houses where sun and wind inform design.

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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 5<br />

The Nature of<br />

the <strong>Beach</strong> <strong>House</strong><br />

The impromptu quality of the modernists’ seaside getaways may be<br />

a thing of the past, but three architects say a connection with nature<br />

is still their primary pursuit<br />

Angles at the Round <strong>House</strong> in<br />

Wellfleet, architect Joy Cuming’s<br />

reinterpretation of a house<br />

designed in the 1970s by Charlie<br />

Zehnder. (Photo by Roe Osborn,<br />

courtesy Aline Architecture)<br />

By Teresa Parker<br />

<strong>Beach</strong> houses have evolved since<br />

the modernists built their getaways<br />

on Outer Cape Cod starting<br />

in the late 1930s. But their work<br />

is still present in the minds of today’s<br />

designers. We asked three architects<br />

working here — Paul Krueger, Joy<br />

Cuming, and Mark Hammer — to tell<br />

us what the words “beach house”<br />

mean to them.<br />

Krueger designed his first Outer<br />

Cape house in 1966 soon after he<br />

served, fresh out of school, as project<br />

manager on Harvard’s Carpenter<br />

Center — on which Le Corbusier<br />

teamed with Josep Lluis Sert. They<br />

were looking for someone “without<br />

preconceived notions of how things<br />

are done,” according to Peter Mc-<br />

Mahon and Christine Cipriani’s book<br />

Cape Cod Modern. Krueger’s Mark<br />

house in Truro is a reimagining of<br />

Provincetown’s fishermen’s shacks<br />

crossed with Le Corbusierian sculpturalism.<br />

Only 12 feet wide, floating<br />

above a moor on pilings, it is at once a<br />

rustic cabin and edgy artwork.<br />

Cuming has been designing and<br />

building houses on the Outer Cape<br />

for 30 years, starting out with the late<br />

Alan Dodge, who had worked with<br />

the self- taught midcentury modern<br />

builder Charlie Zehnder. Now she has<br />

her own firm, Aline Architects Studio<br />

in Orleans. “I don’t think so much<br />

about style as I do about what I’m<br />

relating to, what the site suggests,”<br />

says Cuming. “Modernism allows<br />

quite a lot of freedom to explore materials<br />

and the relationship of a building<br />

to its environment.”<br />

In his 20 years working here,<br />

Hammer says he has always felt a<br />

connection between contemporary<br />

design and the modernist experiments<br />

that dot our woods. “Our<br />

work is very much informed by<br />

our forebears who built the modern<br />

houses here,” he says of his<br />

Cambridge- based Hammer Architects.<br />

“We are connected by the desire<br />

to build a house that feels like it<br />

fits in, and where the sun and wind<br />

inform the design.”<br />

Q: Tell us about your own ideal<br />

“beach house.”<br />

The Mark <strong>House</strong>, built in Truro in 1966, was architect Paul Krueger’s first on the Outer Cape.<br />

Referencing both Provincetown fishermen’s shacks and Le Corbusier, it is only 12 feet wide.<br />

(Photo by Steve Rosenthal, courtesy Krueger Associates)<br />

“I would have to say my ideal is a<br />

tent,” says Paul Krueger from the<br />

Cambridge office of Krueger Associates.<br />

On trips to Wellfleet with his<br />

young family in the 1960s, “we always<br />

camped at the Audubon sanctuary. It<br />

was only gradually that we started to<br />

talk about wanting something a little<br />

sturdier than those canvas walls.”<br />

For him, what’s fundamental is that<br />

a beach house provides immediacy<br />

with nature.<br />

Joy Cuming also thinks of the<br />

seasons she spent living close to<br />

the elements — including on a boat<br />

in Provincetown Harbor. She has no<br />

single mental image of what a beach<br />

house should look like; it might be<br />

one in a row of little cottages or a<br />

freeform space under a curved roof<br />

that follows the undulations of the<br />

dunes. “Its forms and shapes emerge<br />

from the contours of the place,” she<br />

says. Whatever its shape, though,<br />

“a beach house should be a place<br />

where the materials feel at home on<br />

the site. The house needs to feel like<br />

it’s meant to be there. A house that<br />

touches down lightly would be my<br />

ideal.”<br />

“I think ‘beach house’ is kind<br />

of an odd term for the Outer Cape,<br />

since not many houses are right on<br />

the beach here,” says Mark Hammer:<br />

“ ‘Seaside’ is a better term.” His own<br />

house in Truro overlooks a valley, not<br />

the water, which, he says, is “everywhere<br />

close enough.” Although the<br />

houses he builds often include expanses<br />

of glass, he says he’s not always<br />

trying to capture views: “The<br />

ideal is about a connection to nature,<br />

and especially about being able to enjoy<br />

natural light.”<br />

Q. You’ve all been designing<br />

houses on the Outer Cape for<br />

many years. How have beach<br />

houses evolved?<br />

“There is a real change in the kinds<br />

of materials people are looking for,”<br />

says Cuming. “They are more aware<br />

of the scarcity of materials we once<br />

thought were in abundant supply.”<br />

The use of heat- treated wood, electric<br />

radiant heat, and all the technical<br />

details affect the way you build a<br />

house, she says.<br />

Kreuger has watched beach<br />

houses grow larger and in some ways<br />

more serious — the cost of materials<br />

is part of what has driven a desire for<br />

permanence, he says.<br />

Hammer agrees. “Twenty years<br />

ago we were able to build more<br />

continued on page 6

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