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WELLFLEET HOUSE

• Wellfleet, MA
• Drawings complete; Construction cancelled
• 1,000 Square Feet
• SystemArchitects: Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston; Ian Baldwin, Henry Grosman, Joe Jelinek, Ginny Hyo-jin Kang, Ioanna Karagiannakou, Maciej Kusmierski, Megumi Mieno
• Buro Happold, Engineers
• Victoria Marshall and Patrick Eleey, Landscape Consultants

Guest quarters and site plan for a vacation property on Cape Cod that includes sleeping areas for 8, common area with kitchen, 2 bathrooms, a roof deck and an outdoor shower. The site lies on a tree-covered rise 130 feet above Newcomb Hollow Beach. This is not simply a summer retreat but a place of summer return and gathering. The family has summered in Wellfleet for 3 generations and the site accommodates carefree leisure and familial obligation, privacy and togetherness.
Glass and cedar form a front façade that is both organic and abrupt, much like the white-sand bluffs that jut up from the beach below. Tightly-spaced slats act as a brise-soleil, as well as a brise-privé to mediate the forest: narrow voids grant easy views from the kitchen/living area and comfortable screening from the sleeping terrace. Viewed from the rear – from the main house – the thin, horizontal windows punctuating a zinc exterior reveal no more than the sparse array of colored diodes on a CPU. From the inside, the same windows look down on flourishing meadow grass while a glass roof admits the night sky.
The inner workings or habitations of the guest are concealed and there is a constant verticality in the house, making ascending and descending inseparable from program. Tiered bed slots, evoking cabin bunks or sleeping bags under the stars, a sleeping loft and a roof deck are the result of ones in their place. The upward orientation also engages the nearby ocean by elevating views above the 30-foot height of the surrounding trees.

All content © 2011 GAuthier Architect P.C.