copyright 2006 Wellesley Weston magazine, Elm Bank Media
One day five years ago, Wellesley resident Gloria Fox pulled into her driveway and felt a creeping dissatisfaction. It was hard to articulate exactly why the house she had lived in for a decade was no longer satisfying. The grass was cool and moist, the plants were happy and blooming, and she stepped back to the street to consider her house objectively. There was something just not right. Suddenly, she found herself “shopping” the neighborhood, driving around studying other homes, developing a keen eye for the elements that create character, and comparing her own house to the ones she admired from the street.
Fox considered moving, but she loved the location. In a few months, she turned to architect Patrick Ahearn and handed him the responsibility of transforming her acceptable house into something more solid and stately. What she quickly discovered was that character is expensive. Call it the opposite of a facelift: buildings gain substance from their shadows. While we may not want shadow lines on our own faces, the deep shadows on a façade mark a home’s grandeur.
Architectural depth requires thoughtful detailing and multiple parts, and in turn, more maintenance. It is less expensive, for example, to buy windows without mullions than with. And if we want a true divided light, that is, a window broken up into multiple panes of glass, it could cost a bathroom or two. A properly sized portico can cost as much as an addition, forcing many owners to forsake these extra details on the exterior to gain more on the inside.
The price of this decision is eventual dissatisfaction. Enter the second phase of home ownership; taking a long hard look at the house beyond the functional can begin the exciting process of bringing out a house’s inner beauty. Local architects and their clients have found it richly rewarding to change a house’s appearance so that it better reflects the quality details within. In so doing, the house also articulates the owners’ appreciation for the fine older homes, majestic trees, and natural elegance that originally drew us to these historic New England towns.
Start with the front door. If it is up a few stairs, set back from the driveway, and protected by a canopy, then it is formally called the portico, from the same word in Latin, conjuring Roman steps and classical colonnades. The Romans and their Renaissance followers worked hard to get this entry right, fretting constantly about the size, shape, and scale of the columns and entablature (the thickness of the roof that rests on the columns). They understood beauty as a matter of proportions.
Wellesley architect John Chapman is a master of classical proportions, and all of his projects reveal the elegance of this understanding. For a 1930s modified cape in Wellesley, he saw that the original entry was undersized for the house’s width, and didn’t offer the gracious entry that the owners desired. Chapman’s solution was to remove the original gabled entry, bring the front door back in line with the rest of the house, and add a broad and generous neoclassical portico. The new entablature is thick and chiseled, the door is graced by broad sidelights to invite light inside, and the columns define an outdoor room, protected from the rain, where people can pause to enjoy the seasons.
Patrick Ahearn also understands the importance of the entry. For Wellesley resident and residential builder Peter Fallon, he designed a round portico with template-cut grey granite steps to match the solid granite block driveway. Each stone on the tread was carefully cut to create a smoothly curved edge. The result is an unexpectedly baroque portico on a stately Georgian home that offsets the angularity. Again, Ahearn detailed a deep entablature and solid columns to visually support the canopy’s apparent weight. His client drew the line at the idea of a custom curved wood balustrade above, deciding it was prohibitively expensive. Instead, he used wrought iron to top off the entry.
Architect Jan Gleysteen’s first instinct when he bought his 100-year-old Wellesley home was to add a front wrap-around porch and remove the original modest portico. “I love the idea of the front porch—it’s a warm and inviting addition. We have a very social street and people stop by when we’re outside. A few times a year we host neighborhood parties on the porch which is really a wonderful place to enjoy cocktails.” He studied dozens of period homes for details and decided on a flat roof with exposed beam ends for his addition. “I used it because it’s quirky—a historic detail that’s out of the ordinary.” Behind all of Gleysteen’s work is an intense study of period detailing. To transform a ranch house into a true Greek Revival, he spent several days in Wiscasset, Maine, documenting and measuring period structures. The resulting house is astoundingly beautiful outside and within, luxuriously adorned with unexpected elements such as triple-hung windows and full-height interior shutters.
Like Gleysteen, shortly after Barry and Carol Goldman bought their 10-year-old home in Weston, they hired John Chapman to design an expansive front porch. “It transformed the house,” observes Carol, “The original builder had an English manor house in mind, but we didn’t feel it fit into the street. Anyway, my husband always wanted a front porch. His family was from Dorchester and he loved how neighbors there would sit in the front and meet and greet. It was kind of a command center from which you could enjoy the street.” The Goldmans enjoy sitting, entertaining, and reading on their front porch, though in Weston, there isn’t quite that stop by and chat feel. Carol added, “The other day it was really cold, below freezing, and I just sat on the porch and read. The weather didn’t bother me. It was so beautiful to be outside.”
The more we time we spend outside, the more we start to think about how these outdoor places can enhance our lives. Many porches at the back of the house are designed to be transition spaces from interiors to patios, and the landscape beyond. Some people screen them in, but many find that screens destroy the aesthetic. One compelling idea is to incorporate a porch into the house above grade. For a stone home in Newton, John Chapman designed a luscious outdoor room with strong columns resting on stone pedestals at the second floor level. The columns taper gracefully to support a very simple entablature, with a gabled room above. Other details include copper caps and a refined balustrade complementing the elaborate stonework. The ceiling is bead board, very common in traditional homes. The result is a new horizon and a new room: the owners are outside in the trees and have a broader view of their property. And unlike many porches, this one is proportioned like a room to accommodate a full sized table, chairs, grill, and benches.
Architect Peter Sachs observed that we are becoming more informal about how we use our homes. Kitchens spill into family rooms, then out to porches and into yards. The natural informality to the architecture of the turn of the last century—the Shingle, Queen Anne, and Stick styles, therefore appeals to a broad new audience here in Wellesley and Weston. And the key to these styles is in the many different ways they incorporate outdoor rooms, porches, and porticos into their multiple facades. Before air conditioning, these rooms were constantly used in the summer, and encouraged natural ventilation through the house.
With the proper orientation and enough protection from the wind, unenclosed porches can be three season rooms, getting us outside on cooler days, allowing us to enjoy the changing foliage. It is important to size the porch appropriately to accommodate a broad range of uses, and to detail it carefully so that it weathers well. And while natural materials age beautifully in architecture, it isn’t so graceful to fall through a rattan loveseat. Composite furniture doesn’t have to be stored or covered in inclement weather, and it closely mimics the appearance of rattan. Lighting is also an important consideration when thinking about outdoor rooms. Placement and intensity will determine the ways in which the porch is used at night and will also dramatically change a house’s evening appearance. Don’t forget a place to store outdoor items—you don’t want to slap a Rubbermade bin on your new porch! You might also want to think about wiring for speakers for music, or to pipe in cricket sounds before their August debut.
