The front of the House on the Cove on Cape Cod, designed by Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders, is welcoming as well as formal and symmetrical. A small courtyard space is enclosed on three sides by the house and by landscape walls on the fourth. A super-sized fan-light over flat, broad columns marks (but also symbolizes) entry. The gabled bay in which the screen wall sits is smaller than the gable ends that flank the sides of the courtyard. It is balanced, however, by secondary gables that are similar in scale and that set slightly forward of the larger gables. The scale of the screen wall, however, highlights its symbolic role in the overall architecture and landscape. It is scaled more to that overall context than it is to the immediately adjacent courtyard. The actual entry is tucked into the corner of the porch created by this screen wall. The strength of the image allows an irregular plan to accommodate the internal needs without reducing the formality of the entry court and front façade or the power of the entry symbolism.

Where the front is an expanded and formalized "cape", the back, facing an ocean cove and the open ocean in the distance, is more irregular, more massive, and shaped around maximizing water views. We feel it is more in the tradition of a grand shingle-style cottage.