Architecture & Sailing: Shingle-Style Serendipity

An architect’s sailing insights inspire this modern, shingle-style design in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

This article was written by J. Michael Welton. Photography by William Waldron.

When architect Tom Kligerman hopped into a cab on his way to the Providence, Rhode Island airport on a summer morning several years ago, he was greeted with a surprise announcement.

His cabby said there was a shortage of drivers, so they’d be stopping to pick up another passenger in Watch Hill. Once they’d made that stop, the two riders chatted for an hour, then parted ways.

Fast-forward. Kligerman opened up an email and found a second surprise announcement. It was his former fellow taxi mate. He and his wife had bought a property on a cove in Watch Hill and wanted him to design a house there. Kligerman competed for the job and won.

“The thing we were drawn to was that he understood the aesthetic of the area and how the house would look from the water because he was a sailor,” says the wife, a novelist whose husband is in finance. “He had a world-class firm in New York and could do all the due diligence and drawings, but he had local knowledge.”

The couple was just back from Switzerland, where they’d taken a deep dive into the clean lines, fat roofs, and open floorplans of modern architecture. And that’s what they wanted for their new lot, surrounded by water on three sides a site that was highly visible all around.

Kligerman was concerned that the neighbors might not appreciate something quite so contemporary. “I said: ‘Let’s make it a modern interpretation of a traditional house,’” he says. “So it’s a shingle-style house with one foot in the modern idiom, and one in a more traditional idiom.”

At 7,000 square feet, this is no small affair. Inside, it is open, light, casual, and refined, but it is packed with six bedrooms, too. The couple has three children who were young when it was finished in 2014 but are in their twenties now. “We wanted enough bedrooms so our kids could come with their own kids and partners and families eventually,” the client says.

Sited on an acre and a half, the home came with restrictions on how and where it could be built. Anything within 1,000 feet of the water falls under the purview of the Coastal Resources Management Council. “They designated a strange footprint that looked like a little Pac-Man,” Kligerman says. “And it had to be raised 12 feet off the ground.”

The town ruled that the home couldn’t be taller than 35 feet, so there were height limitations as well. Luckily, Kligerman is an architect who views restrictions as positives, since they encourage inventiveness. He looked at his challenges with an artist’s eye.

“It was like a sculpture—it became what was left after we’d chipped away at the box we’d been given,” he expands.

Here, his background as a sailor was truly an asset. He looked at the house as a boat on a prow-shaped piece of land-like a steamer heading out to sea. “It faces south at the narrow gable,” he says. “The broad expanses are at the east and west.”

The outside walls are clad in yellow shingles of Alaskan cedar, a material the architect used also on the planks below. The foundation was poured-in-place concrete, and the cedar planks sheathe it. Even the railings around the house are simple, clean, and horizontal. “It’s Japanese-like,” the client shares.

The roof a big one for a big house features a slant that’s long and angular. “The overhang has the visual effect of pushing everything down,” she says.

The couple wanted a big, open floor plan on the interior with bedrooms that aren’t too expansive. “We wanted to dedicate most of the space to be communal,” she explains. The interior color palette is reminiscent of a ship with white walls, gray decks, and a shiny green for some of the rooms. “I saw the color scheme in nautical terms,” Kligerman says.

Actually, he saw the entire house that way, as it looks out over land and cove. The client says she feels like she’s floating above the water on the bow of a ship. “That’s kind of cool and it’s a byproduct of the limitations we had to deal with,” she continues.

It’s also a byproduct of that shared taxi ride in 2005, one that delivered a moral, according to the architect. “Be nice to everybody you meet,” he says.

In Watch Hill, it’s a belief that paid off in spades.

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