Northshore Home

Northshore Home Spring 18

Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.

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76 W H E N W I L L I A M R U H L first set eyes on a ranch house on Gap Cove in Rockport, he couldn't get the home—a lack-luster building on a floodplain, shoehorned between lichen-covered rocks in a classic coastal North Shore setting—out of his mind. "I'm obsessed with looking online for interesting houses in need of some TLC," says Ruhl, a principal at Boston architecture and design firm Ruhl Walker Architects. He kept track of the home for years as it went on and off the market, eventually buying it in 2012. Six years later, the home has gone from ordinary to breathtaking, a simply styled, 1,600-square-foot modern home raised on 8-foot piers with an open-air porch and a front-row seat to the raw beauty of the cove and the Atlantic beyond. By opening up the space and shielding it from Mother Nature's worst—all while taking pains to keep neighbors and the conservation commission happy—Ruhl transformed his home into a family geta- way that embraces the ocean at its doorstep. Straitsmouth Island, just off to the northeast, shields Gap Cove from winter storms' worst wallops. Back in the 19th century, that mingling of ocean access and protection from nor'easters made it a natural location for a Coast Guard station, complete with 1880s shingled structures. When the station's main observation tower rusted into obsolescence, the town authorized construc- tion of a two-bedroom ranch house to create a family compound on the site. Ruhl discovered the home—nes- tled in a neighborhood of dark Shingle-style homes with red asphalt-shingle roofs plus a few white- and tan-stucco anomalies—while interviewing for another project in Rockport. After scouring the South Shore and the South Coast, Ruhl found that Rockport's craggy shores conjured fond comparisons to coastal Maine, but with favorable proximity to his and his wife's other residence in Watertown. "It's nice to shoot up there for the day, a weekend, or a couple of weeks," Ruhl says. After buying the home from the neighbors, Ruhl started on a renovation that emulates the geometry of a typical New England saltbox. But the rugged setting— just two dozen feet from a coastal bank—and new Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood guidelines posed design challenges for a home uniquely vulnerable to storm surges. Before deciding to raise the home eight feet, Ruhl visited the neighboring bed and breakfast and snapped photos to ensure the renovation wouldn't affect their existing views. New Hampshire-

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