JULY 2006 »  book review

Cape Crusader

The Cape Cod Cottage
by William Morgan
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY; 2006
95 pp.; softcover; 75 b&w illustrations; $24.95
ISBN 1-5689-8575-4

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

The first English settlers in New England tried to transplant late-Medieval architecture, but it didn’t thrive; tall, narrow houses with half-timbering and thatched roofs couldn’t fend off North Ameri-can winters. Consequently, the colonists started shingling their homes and didn’t venture past one-and-a-half stories tall. Without a basement and with no more than five bays, all held fast by a central chimneystack, "the transported English house evolved into the functional, wind-cheating house we call the Cape Cod cottage," writes Rhode Island-based historian/ photographer William Morgan in The Cape Cod Cottage.

His slim book about Capes is as economical, efficient and useful as the houses themselves. Morgan packs a detailed chronology and aesthetic insights into a 15-page introductory essay, then devotes the rest of the study to crisply reproduced recent photographs, which convey the surprising versatility of a seemingly limited architectural form.

Children, he explains, will outline a kind of Cape when asked to draw a house: gable, chimney, central doorway flanked by windows. Morgan calls Capes "fundamental, iconic, and enduring" as well as "humble and ubiquitous" and "the nearly perfect house." Viewed from the front, they seem to consist of two-thirds shingled roof and one-third shingled – or, more rarely, clapboarded – wall. Windows often extend to the cornice line to maximize sunlight in the low-ceilinged ground-floor rooms. On the exteriors, high-relief window trim casts lively shadows. The trim protrudes because antique Capes’ plank shells are usually just a few inches thick, even when plastered, papered or insulated with seaweed.

Roofs are sometimes bowed, and Morgan acknowledges that no one is sure how that tradition started. Carpenters historically doubled as boat builders, and perhaps they carved curved trusses in imitation of ships’ hulls, while adding a few inches of attic headroom. Or maybe English immigrant builders and their descendants retained what Morgan describes as "a memory of English cruck framing, that is, employing naturally bent trees in house building."

Living space was traditionally cozy. "The upstairs sleeping space was reached by way of a miniscule entrance hall with steep stairs that hugged the chimney," Morgan writes. As soon as owners of Capes prospered in the 18th and early-19th centuries, they added wings at the back. They also dressed up the fronts to reflect the latest trends, with Greek Revival dentil moldings, pediments, pilasters and fanlights and Carpenter Gothic brackets. But Capes don’t coexist well with anything grandiose: turrets, colonnades or "other elements expressive of social mobility," Morgan notes. "The proletarian Cape was just not suited to impressing the neighbors." So if a Cape-owning family became more affluent, it would usually demolish and commission a freestanding mansion rather than more low-slung additions.

Victorian aristocrats, in fact, considered Capes hopelessly provincial. But the homey form never quite vanished from the architectural marketplace. Colonial Revival designers such as Royal Barry Wills (1895-1962) and Rolf William Bauhan (1892-1966) built Capes on estates in the early-20th century, complete with two-car garages that resembled converted farm sheds. After World War II, developers and prefabricated-house entrepreneurs filled subdivisions with gables and chimneystacks, to give returning GIs some reassuring homecoming scenery. As Capes spread nationwide, they acquired picture windows and porches. "In real estate argot they became Colonial Capes, Mission Style Capes, Cape Cod Tudors, and no doubt Cape Ranches," Morgan wryly observes. In the 1970s, Postmodernists like Robert Venturi and Robert A.M. Stern started ironically oversizing the Cape, and numerous traditionalists now try to emulate the built-over-time happy accidents of the long rear ells of Capes.

A Cape worth its salt can be extraordinarily varied. It can have horizontal windows tucked under a cornice as clerestories, or verticals filling an end-wall bay. Shutters can be paneled or louvered, and fireplaces and foundations are made of brick or stone. An entryway’s sidelight, framed in Ionic columns or Doric piers, can contain a single pane or a dozen. Large footprints, though, should never be asked of Capes. Morgan often positioned his camera a dozen yards away from the house to emphasize how much foreground expanse of beach, meadow, stone-walled pasture or picket-fenced lane the Cape does not dominate.

His photo essay, depicting some 45 houses or streetscapes across New England, spans chronologically from 1672 to 2004. But it is well curated; Morgan stuck to quintessential Capes, and didn’t try to show every Cape he had ever met. Those Capes that are depicted offer residential clients alternatives to McMansions; architects and builders should hand this book to clients who are seeking creative ways to build modestly.  

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