West Pond House - Estes Twombly + Titrington Architects

INFO

The south coast of Rhode Island has miles and miles of sandy beaches, salt ponds and adjacent neighborhoods of tight lots with modest cottages. Over the past few years this coastline has been discovered and small summer cottages are being replaced with larger year-round houses at an alarming rate. This house, while on a tight lot, was designed to be in scale with the surrounding neighborhood and to fit in without necessarily being a traditional design.

The program is divided into two narrow and parallel parts: a 17-foot wide two-story gabled form, housing smaller rooms, and an attached 19-foot wide one-story shed roofed form, which houses garage, living/dining spaces and the first floor bedroom suite. A second floor guest room doubles as a shared office space to save square footage. The exterior materials are varied to help visually diminish the building mass and the depth of the house is not perceivable from the street. Private spaces face the backyard which abuts conservation land.

The house is all electric, with geothermal heating/cooling and induction cooking. It has a light-colored, durable and wind-resistant metal roof with all roof runoff collected in a 3000-gallon cistern. Gutters not only facilitate rainwater collection but help keep water away from the exterior walls and windows. Native and drought-tolerant plant species help reduce water use.

The owner is an interior designer and selected all the furniture, furnishings and paint colors. While definitely contemporary, the house sits comfortably among older neighbors through the use of traditional materials, forms and scale.

Contractor: Granville Builders, South Kingstown, RI | Landscape: Dennis Staton, Design Outside, LLC | Interiors: Kathy Hayes, The Inside Story, LLC