Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1176984
71 The home's interior has an open plan on the first floor that encourages interaction. Dark-polished white oak floors, New England fieldstone, and six fireplaces—four of them wood-burning—give the house a cozy feel. Gener- ous south-facing energy-efficient windows, designed by Paul Shilhan of the Shilhan Company in Georgetown (and a family friend), frame views of the bucolic outdoors. The house is spacious, with seven bedrooms and plenty of shared space that includes a three-season room with removable walls and roll-down motorized screens. But every room has a specific purpose, says builder Steve Howell, cofounder with his wife, Susan Howell, of Howell Custom Building Group in Lawrence. Howell teamed up with Lafe Covill of TMS Architects in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the design of the new house, which is located in a quiet neighborhood. As Howell says, "It was designed to be a glove-fit for the whole family." The home's exterior is a reflection of the family's love of ski lodges and rustic New England materials, includ- ing red cedar shingles and copper work. Local fieldstone appears on the front porch columns and base, as well as in the retaining walls around the house and in low seat- ing walls around the pool. Massive fieldstone chimneys have custom-cut capstones of carved Asian granite, another point of interest. A band of trim wraps around the exterior of each floor, to reduce the scale of the house and organize the exterior. "It pulls the complex exterior together into a seamless composition; that's very much Shingle style," Howell says.