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"View Slideshow\n\nArchitects Bernard Wharton and Allan Shope are masters of the Shingle Style revival. For many of their clients, this turn-of-the-twentieth-century idiom offers the most livable, attractive and perhaps nostalgic domestic setting they could wish for. A 7,000-square-foot year-round retreat Shope Reno Wharton Associates recently completed on Martha's Vineyard is quite different, however, from the firm's Shingle Style houses. Designed for a Boston financier, his physician wife and their grown son, it could not be an exemplar of the style because of zoning constraints.\n\n\"My wife and I considered it a privilege to own land that carried with it more than a decade of hard-fought conservation-versus-development battles,\" recalls the husband. \"We decided that if we were to buy the property with all its restrictions, we wouldn' apply for variances but instead would appreciate the history and spirit of the rules.\"\n\nThe site is a six-acre segment of a four-hundred-and-twenty-acre former farm in Chilmark, on the southwestern tip of the island. A high moorland where sheep once grazed, the farm is marked by centuries-old low stone boundary walls, and it overlooks a large lake known as Squibnocket Pond and the Atlantic. Legal restrictions to preserve the character of the landscape allow no more than sixteen residences to be built on the entire property.\n\nAlthough there are sweeping views in all directions, stringent rules controlled the placement, dimensions and shape of the house. It could be no higher than eighteen feet above mean natural grade, and its floor plan had to be contained within one and a half acres defined by boundary and wetlands setbacks.\n\nThe husband reports that Wharton and Shope began the project with serious reservations because they were not sure they could fit a large one-story house into the tight building envelope. According to Wharton, though, \"what first appeared as a set of terrible constraints became a wonderful opportunity to design a house very different from what we usually do.\" They began to imagine it as low-lying, earth-hugging and horizontal.\n\nAt an initial meeting in the architects' conference room, the couple studied photographs of the firm's work on the walls. The husband's attention was held by a stable in Massachusetts\u2014long, low, with three cupolas punctuating a steep gabled and dormered roof\u2014designed as a simple and handsome reincarnation of the early rural Shingle Style. \"I looked at this refined structure that was at the same time agricultural\u2014a real country building\u2014and knew it had the qualities we were hoping for,\" he recalls.\n\nThe architects envisioned the house as three similar, interconnected barnlike buildings stepping gradually down-ward from a high point on the moor. By placing two of the eighteen-foot-tall wings on slightly lower finished grades, they created three separate roof ridge heights and floor levels, avoiding a stretched-out look. \"The clients wanted to capture a few select views,\" Wharton explains. \"She loves the Atlantic; he loves Squibnocket Pond.\" By giving each wing a somewhat different orientation, the architects were able to present the couple with their favorite vistas.\n\nEach wing is an assembly of trussed bays reinforced by wood-framed, shingle-covered buttresses. \"They not only keep the building from twisting in extreme weather conditions, but they also give the impression of strength,\" Wharton points out. \"We wanted the house to be and appear firmly grounded on the site.\" He likes the way the buttresses look as well, because they set up a rhythm on the fa\u00E7ades that corresponds with the consistent pattern of windows and French doors. There were no height limits on chimneys, so he designed three\u2014tall, massive and built of stone\u2014one to anchor each wing.\n\nThe entrance, from a small porch on the southeast, leads to the deliberately low-ceilinged and small-scaled entrance hall of the principal wing. Beyond it is a dramatic space, uninterrupted by walls, consisting of seven bays framed by open trusses. This volume\u2014twenty-two feet wide by seventy feet long and seventeen feet tall at the truss apex\u2014encloses the kitchen, dining and living spaces, which are separated by low cabinetry.\n\nThe roof of the main wing has four cupolas\u2014the only reason a height variance was required. \"We fought hard for them,\" Wharton says, \"not only for the daylight they bring into the center of the wing but because they give more vertical definition and they reinforce the barnlike image that first attracted our clients.\"\n\nAttached to the central wing on the east are the husband's study, a screen porch, a round breakfast room and an open porch off the dining and living areas. The entrance hall leads to the son's wing, a space that also serves as guest quarters, a few steps down. The master bedroom wing is at the highest point of the site, connected to the main wing by a short stair. The wife's study, which has a fireplace, is at the top of the stair and adjoins the couple's dressing room and bath.\n\nIn contrast with the sturdy, rustic exteriors of the house, the interiors, by Mariette Himes Gomez, are polished and elegant. The narrowness of the main wing required an axial arrangement of the kitchen, dining and living spaces. Gomez gave each area its own character while maintaining a harmony with the great room as a whole. \"Even without walls it was possible to establish where a room started and stopped,\" she says. \"We created boundaries with the millwork, floor surfaces, rugs and furniture placement. Each space speaks for itself, yet the entire room is unified by the continuity of the ceiling and the subtlety of the palette of paint, wood finishes and fabrics.\"\n\nA challenge for Gomez was the clients' desire that the interior walls be mostly wood, with as few painted surfaces as possible, for low maintenance. While a number of walls and ceilings are faced with beaded boards, other walls are plaster or have horizontal boards. \"I didn' want the walls to be wood with no distinctions,\" explains Gomez, \"so I asked Donald Kaufman, the color consultant, to help me with stains and finishes as well as paint colors.\"\n\nShe and Kaufman chose clear wood finishes that strengthen color and grain. Douglas fir trusses, wainscoting and cabinetry in the main wing, for example, have a clear finish that brings forth the redness of the wood, and the kitchen has a terra-cotta floor to match. The warm, neutral tones of the painted surfaces defer to the exterior shingles.\n\nAmerican folk art and furniture is the clients' supreme interest, and they have an extensive collection in their primary house in Boston and in their two other residences. Their decision to move the very best of it to the Vineyard house was implemented by Gomez. \"I would indicate where I thought art was needed, and we'd look through their inventory and decide what to put there.\"\n\nOn one wall, in the company of mounted folk art drawings, is a framed set of Bernard Wharton's original sketches for the house. \"We give all our clients early drawings so they can see where their home came from and how everything started,\" he says. His first plan for the Vineyard house was open, axial, modular, Miesian, a modern building cloaked in traditional materials. And so it was built\u2014as a beautifully conceived, shingle-covered, but not Shingle Style, house."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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