In our first book, we talk about a sense of place, but with this one, we take that concept to the next level. This time, sense of place is just one of the narratives informing our projects.
— MARK A. HUTKER
Designing someone’s home is a big responsibility. “It’s a huge stewardship proposition,” says architect Mark A. Hutker. “It’s a responsibility not just to the homeowners but their children, their children’s children, and also to the community.”
Hutker and his fellow principals at Hutker Architects live up to this tall order daily. Since the founder took ownership of the Martha’s Vineyard firm in 1987, he and his team have delivered their own interpretation of New England vernacular, one that nods to tradition with pared-down, landscape-hugging forms.
Recently, the firm released its third book, New England Coastal: Homes that Tell a Story A followup to A Sense of Place: Houses on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod this coffee table hardcover features 13 projects ranging in locale from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Aquinnah, the southwestern tip of Martha’s Vineyard. Hutker shared the storytelling with his fellow principals, and the result is a comprehensive overview of the firm’s standout work to date, including several never-before-published residences.
“In our first book,” says Hutker, “we talk about a sense of place, but with this one, we take that concept to the next level. This time, sense of place is just one of the narratives informing our projects.”
Multiple inputs, or narratives, steer the fabrics of Hutker homes, which delicately dance the line between modern and tradition in evocative ways. The firm’s design process considers various histories:
the client’s family, the history of place and region, prevalent building materials. They also study the land itself and the particularities of topography, vegetation, and sun orientation.
“It takes time to try and understand a community, but it’s fun looking for foot holds, for the reasons why people do things a certain way,” elaborates Hutker.
“When you can tie a design back to something valued by everyone in a community, it makes the result more powerful.”
Ultimately, clients, future clients, and architecture enthusiasts respond positively to Hutker designs because of psychology: because of the way they make them feel. The envelopes evoke positive emotions by playing with recognizable forms ingrained in our subconsciouses.
With four offices dotting Southern New England (Vineyard Haven, Falmouth, Plymouth, and Boston), Hutker Architects continues to forge ahead, expanding its clientele beyond the Cape and Islands to northern New England and the Mid-Atlantic.
For Hutker, this book represents a launching point for the future of Hutker Architects: “By carefully understanding our past projects, we are assembling a vision of what we can accomplish next,” he says.
“Ultimately,” he continues, “we are looking for meaning. We are trying to make homes that mean something to the people who live in them and the communities in which they reside.”
BREACHING ROCK
Excerpted with permission
The story of this Martha’s Vineyard house sounds at first like a contradiction in terms, or maybe a Zen koan: How do you make something that’s actually not what it appears to be, but do so in an authentic way? And consider a second paradox: How does a project undertaken for a client who, at the beginning, is dubious about the power of narrative to shape a home, end up becoming entirely about narrative?
Sheltered deep in the woods of Chilmark and looking towards the island’s western end, the property is on hilly terrain, littered with boulders left by ancient glaciers as they departed not quite twenty thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age. The hefty stones bring to mind the recumbent backs of sleeping cattle, while some of the largest hump up from the ground almost like breaching whales…
In the end, a Chilmark homestead that hadn’t existed a few years before came into being already trailing a long backstory behind it. It’s the kind of place, you feel, that must have belonged to a great-great-grandmother and stayed in the family ever since.
BACK RIVER
Excerpted with permission
More often than not, the first question asked about a house’s design is “Traditional or contemporary?”—the tacit assumption being that every building will count as either one or the other…Creatively occupying the fertile borderland between past and present, however, has become a Hutker Architects specialty—to the degree that trying to analyze where traditional leaves off and modern begins in one of the firm’s projects risks missing the point entirely. An organic melding of yesterday and today is always there; what’s truly important is which specific style notes are struck and the beauty of the harmony that they make together. The imaginative evolution of local vernacular is what provides the key.
It was precisely this kind of in-between quality that appealed greatly to one couple in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Both partners had long histories in the vicinity, and they had raised their three college-age sons in a neighborhood close to the town’s center that could almost serve as the dictionary definition of classic New England. With the boys now no longer in full-time residence, change beckoned…
Modern or not, they still preferred to make their anticipated home a politely reserved addition to its surroundings. The building therefore nestles into its hillside above the marsh, the main floor at street level. Loose clumps of rhododendron and similar understory growth screen it from the road, making it only sporadically visible—and never all at once—to car and foot traffic passing by. A second story underneath, plus a generous outdoor terrace and pool, are noticeable just from within the property itself—and largely unseen even from down along the shore.
NEW ENGLAND COASTAL
Available at local book sellers and online retailers.
