An Ode to the Coast

Thomas A. Kligerman leads Kligerman Architecture & Design, a New York firm whose work, largely residential, with institutional, retail, and hospitality projects as well, is rooted in tradition while making room for modern innovation and new creative flourishes. He began his career at Robert A.M. Stern Architects after earning a BA in architecture from Columbia and a master’s in architecture from Yale, then spent more than 30 years at Ike Kligerman Barkley, the firm he co-founded with John Ike in 1989. Effective January 1, 2023, he struck out on his own to lead Kligerman Architecture & Design alongside his four partners, Joe Carline, Drew Davis, Margie Lavender, and Ross Padluck.

His work is widely published in Architectural Digest, Veranda, Period Homes, and Traditional Building, and he has won numerous design awards. He is the author of four books: The New Shingle House, Shingle and Stone As I See It: A Life in Detours, and, most recently, Summer by the Sea, published by The Monacelli Press.

We spoke with Tom about the new book, what inspired it, and how it expresses his philosophy and approach to designing new traditional houses. Beautifully written and illustrated, it features sixteen houses along the coast of Rhode Island.

Unlike most books authored by architects, Summer by the Sea: Cottages from Watch Hill to Little Compton is not about your own work but about houses designed by others, both past and present. What motivated you to write it?

It’s funny, it started out as a book about my work. I was going to write about building a house for myself, and I thought that would be a great way to tell the story of Rhode Island through a single house. And the publisher said, not interesting enough. Why don’t you write a book about other houses along the coast of Rhode Island?

So, it really became a thank-you letter to the state of Rhode Island, which I’ve been visiting since I was 10 years old. I decided to expand beyond architecture. It’s a story told through 16 houses, but I wanted to tell the story of Rhode Island, its history, its geology, shipwrecks, lighthouses. I wanted to tell a more complete story, and these houses became the vehicle for me to do that. It’s an ode to the state. It’s an ode to the coast.

Vincent Scully gave your beloved house type its name. Were you a student of his? What else did you learn from him at Yale?

I was not a student of Vincent Scully’s, although when I was in architecture school at Yale, he was still a presence there. He was semi-retired, and he would periodically come into the architecture school and talk to us or look at what we were doing. Ironically, my father knew him well, my father was on the faculty at Yale. And I worked for Robert Stern, who was a student of Scully’s. So, by DNA, in a way, I was connected to him, although he was never actually my teacher.

He did invent that name, for his doctoral thesis. [Scully’s 1949 Yale dissertation was titled The Cottage Style; it was later published under the title The Shingle Style, originally called something like the New Colonial style. The architects who designed it, McKim, Mead & White and others like them, never called it the Shingle Style. They did use shingles; I think that’s a reference to the shingles of early colonial buildings in places like Nantucket and up in Maine. But that name never occurred to them. It’s such a great alliteration. It’s such a great name.

If you read Scully’s The Shingle Style and the Stick Style, it’s incredibly readable, and it’s a little like my book: partly the history of the early United States, how people came over and found these forests and started using shingle. It puts the style really into perspective.

Why was the gambrel roof so common on summer cottages along the New England coast? You mention this in your chapter on Bayridge.

I’m not completely sure. I think part of it is just functional. You put a gambrel roof on a house, and you get a lot more space on the second floor for the same footprint. It may also be a reference to barns. The Shingle Style was very eclectic, they picked up on colonial details, on Victorian details, and barns were also fair game.

But you’re right, it is so synonymous with the style. I’ve noticed that when I post a gambrel-roofed house on my Instagram, it gets a lot of attention, a lot of likes. So, there’s something about that shape. Maybe it’s the hominess, the suggestion of a barn in the countryside. There’s something about that image that people like. And if you drive through towns like Watch Hill, or Weekapaug, or the other places along the coast of Rhode Island, so many of them are gambrel-roofed houses.

I hadn’t thought about the height, getting more space on the top floor, the way a mansard roof does.

The mansard is not used a lot in the Shingle Style. It was used more in the style that preceded it, Second Empire, when they did those sorts of French houses. But it does do the same thing. It does give you a lot of space on the second floor.

You have a particular fondness for the pimento-olive wallpaper in the bar at Bayridge, in Watch Hill. Is it the wallpaper you covet most, or the well-stocked bar I see in your book?

It’s both. That’s a wonderful house, owned by a wonderful woman and her family. Her mother bought the house in the 1940s; the house was built in 1900. And what’s so great about that house is that it really sums up everything I try to talk about in the book. It’s a wonderful Shingle Style house that is not heated and is not air-conditioned. You go there in the summer and it’s open to the weather. They must close it down in the fall because it’s too cold to be in there.

The wallpaper and the bar just sum up for me the sort of fun life they live in that house. If you look at the kitchen, she’s painted all the chairs different colors. The wallpapers on the second floor are colorful, some of them almost tongue-in-cheek. In the bathroom there are travel posters on the wall. But that space under the stairs, right off the living room, is joyous. And that’s what life in that house feels like, everybody’s celebrating life, and the bar is the epicenter of that feeling.

Oh, I want to be there. I was drawn to that.

I’m quoting something you wrote in Summer by the Sea: “This is where I learned that buildings are layered with history, memories, and textures; that Shingle-Style cottages are best with expansive porches; that whether Cape Cod style or modern, all should blend harmoniously into nature and capture it. They are never just structures.” Elaborate on that.

First, I love how the screened porch really is such an American invention. You don’t really see them in European houses. Maybe you see them in South America and places like that. But the porch, and the screened porch, it’s the old cliché, the sound of the slamming screen door is the sound of the American summer. I love the way these houses reach out into the landscape. I love the way they bring in the breeze and the light and the gardens. That’s what’s important structurally.

But the thing I learned in writing the book is that there’s a palpable sense of history in them, not necessarily the history of the United States, on this date this happened and on this date that happened, but more the history of the families that live in them, or the succession of families that lived in them.

There’s a layering of use, of traffic patterns, of family traditions that you can see. Sometimes you can see them, and sometimes you can simply sense them. At Bayridge, she spoke about her mother painting the living room green, and she spoke about how, when she moved in, there was staff in the kitchen, and now it’s the family kitchen. They cook for themselves, and the chairs are painted different colors. The houses have this layering of life, and I think that’s one of the things that’s wonderful about them. They are not just structures. They are a record of emotion and family and summer and salt air. I love them.

Many of these houses are generational.

Yes, they were built by the great-grandparents or grandparents of the people in them now. Some of them were designed by architects and some were not. There’s one called the Periscope. It was built by the owner’s grandfather, who went out into the field and cobbled this house together. I don’t know if they stole the lumber, but they found the lumber, they found the windows, and they put it all together on top of a boulder in the middle of a field overlooking the ocean. So, in some cases there was no architect involved at all.

Only one of the 16 houses in the book is your own design‚ Nushka Hoo, in Weekapaug, Rhode Island. Nushka for the Native American tribe that lived in the area, Hoo the Anglo-Saxon word for hill.

That’s my house, the one I share with my family.

Do you live there full-time?

I live in New York City, but I wish I lived in Rhode Island full-time. I go back and forth almost weekly. My daughters are there on a regular basis; my wife is there probably more than half the time. So, it really has become the epicenter for our family.

It is a heated house. These days, if you build a house, it must be heated. In the old days you could build a house that didn’t have to be heated or cooled or anything, you didn’t even have to have plumbing in it. The house we rented for decades, the one my parents rented when I was a kid, had an outdoor shower. It did have one bathroom inside, for six bedrooms. So, it was a different world. There was no insulation. Today you can’t build that house; the codes require you to heat it, so it must be insulated. Houses have taken on a completely different feeling from the kinds of houses I reference in the book, which were just wood. They were cottages. They weren’t shacks, but they weren’t much beyond that, either.

They call them camps in some quarters. What guided your creation of this new contextual family house, the one you live in?

What I tried to do in that house was capture what I love about the older houses that weren’t insulated. One of the things that happens these days, when you must insulate, is that you choose the economical way to close the walls up, and that tends to be painted gypsum wallboard, sheetrock. To me that’s fine; you can do beautiful colors and things. But I wanted to recreate the wood interiors of the old houses, and so the house we designed, I did it with my wife, is completely paneled in wood. The only sheetrock in the house is, I think, the kitchen ceiling. Everything else is wood paneled.

The living room alone has five different woods: a poplar ceiling, an Alaskan yellow cedar frieze, mahogany and oak floors, pine windows. All the bedrooms are different woods, so each has its own character, and, frankly, its own scent. Oak smells different from Douglas fir. So, I tried to recreate that, and I tried to make it look like one of the old houses, even though it’s heated and air-conditioned and you can be there at Christmas or New Year’s just as easily as in the middle of July. TB