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News Article PSD’s “Sandy Bluff” Featured On The Cover & Within New England Home

Nip & Tuck: A Cape Cod vacation home goes from chalet to seashore thanks to an all-star team's deft design.

It was an honor to be entrusted by our clients with the creation of this special home and property and to now see it on the cover and gracing the pages of New England Home's 2023 Cape & Islands Issue. For this project, PSD served as the architect, builder, and landscape architect.

Despite its location in coastal southern New England, Sandy Bluff was originally built around the turn of the 21st Century as a sprawling mountain lodge-like home separated into distinct volumes—a center/near wing, and two far wings. The entire foundation and far wings were workable for the new owners of the home, but the center and near wing were not. PSD sought a design that would function as a completely new home but incorporate the existing elements after the center/near wing was removed. Efficient re-use of the existing conditions demanded an irregular, additive composition, so integration of the parts was through materials (like the shingle wrapper), repeated motifs at different scales in different locations (like the arches that are porch columns, widow’s walk balustrade, and arbor and gate patterns), and a loose but studied assemblage of historically-rooted New England vernacular forms, shapes, and details. Multiple scales, vertical and horizontal directional shifts, materials/finishes, and isolated but not overall symmetry exist in an eclectic and sophisticated balance. The result is a grand estate home that sits at the edge between order and chaos—that looks like it grew thoughtfully and deliberately over time, and through multiple stylistic eras, even though the time trajectory of its growth is more or less within the last quarter century.