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Beach/House, Fall 2024

Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.

Shadows lengthen. The crowds are gone. The weather is at its most glorious. Autumn arrives and cozy season begins on the Outer Cape. It’s the time of year when people here head back indoors to tackle some of the household projects that were impossible to even think about during summer’s hubbub. Evenings that were spent dining outdoors are now savored in front of a fire. In this special edition of the Provincetown Independent's home, garden, and design pages, we’re easing our way into the fall projects that come before the year-end holidays and the promise of the new year ahead.

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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Fall</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 15<br />

Thomas Moses works in his North Truro shop. (Photos by Agata Storer)<br />

A Craftsman Finds the<br />

Power of Punk in Plywood<br />

Thomas Moses builds his own riffs on Cape Cod modern design<br />

By Abraham Storer<br />

When the Cape Cod Modern<br />

<strong>House</strong> Trust was a fledgling<br />

organization, Thomas<br />

Moses signed up to advance its mission<br />

to restore the Outer Cape’s modern<br />

houses, many of which were in<br />

the Cape Cod National Seashore and<br />

falling into disrepair.<br />

Moses had met the trust’s founding<br />

director, Peter McMahon, in 2007<br />

through a mutual friend and, captivated<br />

by the history of the modern<br />

houses, began commuting from his<br />

home in Belmont to barter his carpentry<br />

skills for the opportunity to<br />

occasionally stay in one of the houses<br />

with his wife, Milisa Moses.<br />

In 2014, Thomas came to Wellfleet<br />

to work for two weeks on the<br />

Weidlinger house, renovating it<br />

during the day and camping out in<br />

it at night. After a construction crew<br />

had to move on to another job, a tree<br />

fell on the roof, and Moses’s commitment<br />

to the project deepened. His<br />

two- week sojourn to the Cape has<br />

now turned into a decade.<br />

While working on the Weidlinger<br />

house, Moses spent his nights looking<br />

for real estate. At the time, a<br />

small house in Eastham could be<br />

had for a realistic price, he says. He<br />

moved out of the job site and Milisa<br />

joined him.<br />

For a time, Moses worked for<br />

and was mentored by craftsman and<br />

builder Cregg Sweeney of Orleans. In<br />

2020, he formed his own company,<br />

Dunehaus, where he merges his carpentry<br />

skills with a love for modern<br />

design.<br />

Many of the projects that Moses<br />

works on today pay homage to the<br />

history of modern architecture on the<br />

Outer Cape. Like many carpenters,<br />

he does things like interior trim and<br />

casework, cabinetry, built- ins, and<br />

restoration. But he’s more likely to be<br />

using plywood than more traditional<br />

materials. “I don’t do crown molding,”<br />

he says. Outer Cape style, he<br />

says, is above all about simplicity.<br />

In his shop at Tradesmen’s Park<br />

in North Truro, Moses points out a<br />

few samples of his favorite material:<br />

birch plywood. Whereas plywood is<br />

commonly used as a support material<br />

under flooring or in walls, Moses uses<br />

it as a finish material. On his projects,<br />

it’s usually the star of the show.<br />

Behind his workbench, he stores<br />

his materials and tools in two of his<br />

creations: a long floating plywood<br />

box bolted to the wall and a plywood<br />

desk accented with yellow and gray<br />

Formica laminate. Moses chooses<br />

high- quality prefinished plywood<br />

and typically leaves the edges of the<br />

plywood exposed rather than covering<br />

it with trim. The effect is clean,<br />

unfussy, elegant, and utilitarian.<br />

In Moses’s Eastham home, another<br />

of his floating boxes runs the<br />

length of a wall. Also constructed<br />

with ¾- inch plywood and featuring<br />

exposed edges, this box hangs under<br />

a bay window and hovers about a foot<br />

off the ground. Its height and width<br />

are both about 14 inches, making it<br />

unobtrusive, but its length provides<br />

continued on page 16<br />

At a house in Wellfleet, undercounter<br />

windows offer peeks of the pitch pines<br />

outside the kitchen.

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