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Saturday 26 June 2021
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Oceanside home for sale, 3,500 square feet for $ 5.2. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Little Compton is a place of its own. With its farms stretching down to the sea, old houses and old money, the city is almost a perfect piece of the New England coast. Given its Quaker heritage of agriculture and serenity, and until the recent discovery of the south coast towns along Buzzards Bay, this preserved Brigadoon has so far avoided unfriendly development.
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Friends Reunion House, Little Compton. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Coastal real estate is still desirable, but Little Compton has few homes for sale. Of a dozen properties on Zillow, only a handful are priced below seven figures; more typical are the houses for 3.6 and 4.8 million dollars on the market. The most expensive home, at $ 5.2 million, is a beautifully set home on Sakonnet Beach by one of the most accomplished architects of modern seaside homes, Maryann Thompson.
Little Compton’s signature architectural aesthetic is seen as an American first: 17th- and 18th-century central fireplace trusses, Cape Cod cottages, or early 20th-century rusticator cottages with porches to catch the breeze, and all are wrapped in ubiquitous cedar shingles.
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Warren’s Point House, circa 1886. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Little Compton, however, has a history of non-traditional, if not avant-garde modern homes, starting with the international-style flat-roof house built on Warren’s Point Road by Harvard-trained architect Thomas Marvell. Some of the nationally renowned designers working here include Arquitectonica (the colorful Miami Vice building), William Rawn (Seiji Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood) and the brilliant Goosewing Farm designers Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Regional stars, such as Estes / Twombly, Michelle Foster and Roger Ferris, have also contributed to beautiful contemporary interpretations of the local tranquil vibe.
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Publisher’s House House & Garden Dominique Browning by Dan Busescu. PHOTO: Will Morgan
One of the most interesting of these new homes is a 1700 square foot, fifteen year old house surrounded by two acres of woodland. It is perhaps the cheapest, least flexible, and architecturally significant new home in the city in recent memory. 6 Long Highway was actually built on a shoestring, by two artists looking for an idyllic retreat after years of loft living in Boston. (The house was just released, at the lowest cost of any offering in Little Compton.)
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Small home-studio in Compton. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Brolyn Jones and Robert Bauer, both painters, were looking for land in Rhode Island to build their dream home and studios. Needing a base for their research, they rented an apartment in South Providence owned by architect Caleb Messier. When they found their wooded acres, they asked him to design a house for the site, but they couldn’t afford any of the builders’ estimates. So Messier suggested that he and five recent Roger Williams graduates build the house themselves.
The result of the crew, calling themselves Sixteen on Center, was a carefully designed dwelling. Clients born in Iowa compared the collaborative project to a community barn. And like a utility shed, the house has no superfluous design elements – just a basic shelter under a slightly pitched standing seam roof. The living quarters of the house are clad in Eastern European cedar clapboards, while the studio wing is wrapped in dark gray cement panels from Germany.
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Studio Wing: Anthracite panels are secured with stainless steel clips. PHOTO: Will Morgan
Rob and Uschi Yaffe, creators of Pawtucket’s Garden Grille and The Grange in Providence, purchased the home when the original guests decamped to Maine and converted what was a pair of studios into a den and guest bedroom . The open floor plan is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s cheapest homes; like them, it features a radiant floor heating in poured concrete, not to mention varying ceiling heights to shape movement throughout the interior.
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Loft above the living-dining-kitchen. PHOTO: Will Morgan
The kitchen and dining area are below the mezzanine, while the two-story living room overlooks abundant nature: mature holly, tours of wild turkeys and foxes, and a pond that offers a “bullfrog symphony” from May to October. The views of the woods, as well as the play of light on the large expanses of blank walls, constitute the main decoration.
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Nature view from the living room. PHOTO: Will Morgan
The minimalist aesthetic and inexpensive but rock-solid construction, along with the proximity to nature, make this a special home. Rob Yaffe calls it “magic”. It reveals another dimension to the usual clichés about the city. Rather than follow the country gentleman style of longtime nobility or the elaborate beach houses that follow fresh silver, 6 Long Highway reinforces the strong traditions of Little Compton. It offers a nod to its humble Quaker roots and agricultural utility, while being a work inspired by contemporary architectural design.
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GoLocal architecture critic William Morgan has written about design and cities for various newspapers, including the New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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