The house is open to the south-facing more private back yard (and spectacular harbor and sound views beyond) with banks of picture windows. In the first floor living spaces these windows occur in two oversized bay windows. There are more traditional double-hung windows on the main entry and side elevations, and here the individual windows as openings-in-the-wall create a more closed feeling than the continuous banks of glass.
The house is designed to be compact in both its planning and in its massing. An efficient floor plan with a nearly square footprint, and a simple shape that is wrapped with shingles and topped with gambrel roofs, led to an object-like form.
The site is very tight. A house of this size was allowed by zoning only because it replaced an older house with the same ground cover.
Exaggerated scale and details like oversized windows with thick muntins, oversized shutters, stout columns, and big overhangs and porch brackets, give the house a hint of tongue-in-cheek playfulness. They also bring the overall scale of the house down by confusing one’s expectations. This exaggeration, along with the compact object-like quality noted above, yields a small house with big scale that feels both small enough for its site but large enough to hold its own in a neighborhood of bigger houses on bigger lots.
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