Beach/House, Fall 2024

16 | Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Fall 2024
A Craftsman Finds the Power of Punk in Plywood
continued from page 15
ample storage space for books and
records.
In his home office, Moses shows
off another of his long horizontal
structures: a wall- to- wall desk, one
side for himself, the other for Milisa.
Moses was inspired by a wall- to- wall
table against a window in the office at
the Kugel- Gips house — another of
the houses restored by McMahon —
which he admired for its continuous,
strong surface but also its airy and
open effect.
Besides seeing its design potential,
Moses appreciates plywood’s
durability, seen, for example, in the
Moses used ¾- inch plywood to create this floating box for storing books and records at his own
house. (Photos by Agata Storer)
The plywood kitchen built by Thomas Moses and designed by Anthony Lee for Ira Ziering and
Godeleine de Rosamel in Wellfleet.
kitchen at the Kuhn house, now a
derelict in the Seashore in Wellfleet.
“The house is rotted from the outside,”
says Moses, “but it still has a
beautiful kitchen built with ¾- inch
plywood.” McMahon’s book, Cape Cod
Modern, describes how the Kuhns’ architect,
Nathaniel Saltonstall, “created
a casually sophisticated cottage by
mixing rough and refined finishes.”
For early mid- century architects,
McMahon says, plywood was an exotic
material — one they enjoyed experimenting
with. The industrial design
duo Charles and Ray Eames were creating
functional furniture from molded
plywood in the early 1940s. By the
late 1940s and early ’50s, when the
trust’s Breuer and Weidlinger houses
were built in Wellfleet, plywood had
become “sort of a fancy material,”
according to McMahon. Pine was used
for subfloors and sheathing while plywood
was reserved for interior paneling,
exterior siding, and cabinetry.
Weldtex was the go- to brand of
plywood, a grooved material that is
no longer produced. It has proved
resilient over the years. The Kepes
house, designed by Marcel Breuer in
1949, used Weldtex for exterior siding
and held up until recently when
it was replaced with marine plywood.
Weldtex was also used in interiors.
For one of the trust’s restoration
projects, McMahon and his team
sourced some vintage Weldtex from
a stairwell of what’s now the Harbor
Stage theater, bartering the material
for a sheetrock job.
By the 1950s, plywood had become
more ubiquitous, and its affordability
and durability turned it more
into a structural construction material,
often hidden under flooring or
walls. But architects, creative types,
and design- minded customers have
continued to favor it as a finish material.
“It’s like exposed concrete,” Mc-
Mahon says. “It has a down- market
hipness.”
When Moses was developing his
carpentry skills in the Boston area,
he was also playing in bands as part
of the city’s hardcore and punk scene.
His attraction to the architects of the
modern houses had to do with their
originality and anti- establishment
ethos.
“These architects were sort of
punk,” he says. “They were picking
poor materials to work with and
experimenting.”
In a kitchen Moses recently fin-