The Cliffside House

Site

The Cliffside House occupies an exposed granite ledge on the eastern shore of Somes Sound — a stretch of glacial bedrock the building had to accept rather than overcome. The form was drawn from the contours of the rock, the elevation from the prevailing weather, the cladding from the salt that travels three hundred days a year on the wind. The house feels less placed than uncovered.

Material

Western red cedar, charred and oiled to the color of wet slate. Cold-rolled blackened steel at the roof seams. A single quarter-sawn white oak threshold at the entry. Inside, lime-washed plaster, hand-troweled to retain the marks of its making. The palette is deliberately narrow — the rooms do the work.

Light

Light arrives on this site from two directions and one season: south through the spruce, east across the water, autumn through spring. The fenestration was designed to gather rather than capture — a slow accumulation of late-afternoon gold in the great room, a sliver of dawn at the primary bedroom’s east elevation, a deepening fall of shadow along the timber-framed gallery.

Life

The owners moved in on a Thursday in late October, in the rain. Within a week, the house had begun to behave the way the architects had hoped — a low hum of footsteps on the heart-pine floor, the faint percussion of weather against the cedar, lamps on at four in the afternoon. The Cliffside House is intended to be inhabited for a long time. It will look better in twenty years than it does today.