Beauty in Structure

For the past seven summers I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with my girlfriend’s family during their vacation in Maine. For the past 13 years the family has rented the same lovely beach house. It’s a fascinating and intriguing house because it puts on display what every other wood frame home conceals: the wood frame! And it turns out, that it can be quite beautiful.

The home is a simple 2 story beach house built for sandy feet, family gatherings and empty winters. It looks like every other home on the street with its gabled roof and quaint front porch. But the inside is where its personality lives. It keeps you subtly aware that you’re at the beach with its casual and natural look.

The only plastered and painted room is the recently renovated bathroom. Every other room is a honey brown of wide-plank wainscoting panels and exposed studs and joists. It provides character to a fairly uninspired home layout because the typically smooth surfaces now are textured with shelves and nooks and other cool geometries.

The amount of exposed structure is appropriate to the site and the surrounding beach culture. This exposed look is not something that would be found so extensively in an Arlington or Cambridge home. But this same approach of exposure, executed with more restraint, could translate well into Greater Boston’s homes.

A great example of this is the Void House in Brussels, Belgium. It celebrates wood and the construction method and does it in a clean and contemporary way.



Wood framing is cool and it already is a part of traditional and contemporary colonial homes. Why not highlight it?