Commission OKs New Design for West End House

PROVINCETOWN — The Historic District Commission stepped outside its usual role of weighing in on changes to the weathered shingles and peaked rooflines of Provincetown’s older structures on Nov. 5 to review the proposed design for a new house on an undeveloped lot in a gated subdivision on a hill in the far West End.

Architect Graham Brindle of Turkel Design in Somerville presented plans for a two-story 2,700-square-foot house with a finished basement and one-car garage at 4 Pilgrims Landing. The 9,000-square-foot lot, situated on top of a dune, overlooks salt marshes and Provincetown Harbor.

The property is part of the 3.5-acre tract at 2 Commercial St. formerly owned by Carl and Dorothea Murchison. The couple built a modernist house there in 1957 after their previous home on the same lot was destroyed in a fire. It was a Portuguese-style villa known as “Castle Dune” built by lifelong resident Joshua Payne in 1916, according to the Mass. Historical Commission’s MACRIS database of historic properties.

The new house was designed by the Architects Collaborative in Cambridge. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a partner in the Collaborative, is believed to have been involved in the design.

Peter McMahon, co-author of Cape Cod Modern and founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, provided notes he had written on the Murchison house when the property went up for sale in 2008. He wrote that the house was an exception to the structures that a group of “masters of modern design” like Marcel Breuer and Serge Chermayeff had built for themselves and their clients on the Outer Cape. Those were “mostly quite humble in size and material.”

The Murchison House, based on a Japanese temple plan, said McMahon, was an “extravagant, state-of-the-art modernist villa perched on a hill at the last point of terra firma in Provincetown.”

The property remained in the Murchison family with a reclusive relative living there in the decades preceding its sale in 2008.

“Both the family and community are hoping someone with the financial capacity will buy and preserve it rather than tear it down to make room for more of the bland condos that increasingly surround it,” wrote McMahon.

Clifford Schorer, an art collector and Southborough resident, purchased it for $6,550,000.

Schorer restored the Murchison house, which had fallen into disrepair. At the time of the purchase, he also secured approval to divide the property into nine lots that remain part of a private association that includes the Murchison house.

As part of the subdivision approval, the town and Schorer signed an agreement stipulating that the houses built on those lots would be harmonious with the modern and contemporary aesthetics of the Murchison house.

The agreement also requires that plans undergo review by the Historic District Commission, with that panel empowered to allow the modern design elements.

The house proposed for 4 Pilgrims Landing features a flat roof with thin edges and deep overhangs similar to those of the Murchison house. The exterior will be weathered cedar vertical siding, floor-to-ceiling glass, and metal panels with a bronze finish used as accents. The large deck overlooking the West End salt marsh will feature a built-in plunge pool.

At 23 feet, the height of the house doesn’t interfere with the views from the Murchison house, complying with the limit in the agreement with the town, Brindle told the commission.

His proposal was well received. “I think it’s spectacular, and I wouldn’t say to change a thing about it,” said chair John Dowd, who moved approval of the plan “as is.”

Commission member Thomas Biggert stalled the vote to express his concern over the sides of the house, which are essentially solid wood with a single slim window.

“It just seems like there’s an opportunity with new construction to do something more textural,” Biggert said. When he was working in design in Los Angeles, he said, there were “all sorts of these concrete stucco boxes stuck on the side of the hill, with incredible views but no street presence. That’s what this is reminding me of.”

Peter Gal, the California owner of the property, said he is talking to an interior decorator about the potential of incorporating some local art into the exterior of the structure.

The commission voted to approve the design, with Biggert the only dissenter.

In a phone interview, Brindle said that once you get outside the historic district in Provincetown there are areas where contemporary building design can be used. “But I think this site, this hilltop, is as close as you can get to downtown and still be building modern architecture,” he said.

Brindle said his firm “pulls from a lot of the kind of modern and mid-century modern aesthetics” in its designs, but with 4 Pilgrims Landing, “We tried to take a lot of inspiration from the Murchison house itself and carry those themes into our house.”

The next step in the review process is a determination that the scale of the proposed design fits within the scale of the neighborhood, said Brindle.

The Murchison house is not the only structure on that West End dune that was designed by world-renowned architects. Schorer hired Hariri & Hariri of New York to design the first house in the newly established subdivision.

On the Hariri & Hariri website, the 2,400-square-foot beach house, constructed in 2013, is described as “only steps away from a masterwork of 20th-century architecture by Walter Gropius.”

The website goes on to say, “The contours and curvature of the land combined with the city’s [sic] 23-foot height limit were used to develop a snug, intimate relationship between the architecture and the site.”

In Building Provincetown: The History of Provincetown Told Through Its Built Environment, author David W. Dunlap wrote that the design of the house at 6 Pilgrims Landing bore “more than a passing resemblance” to the firm’s residential development in Salzburg, Austria. “Their house is in one sense a welcome and needed breath of pure oxygen, a declaration that there is room in modern Provincetown for more than Ye Olde Cape Cod shingles and shutters.”

Dunlap said in a phone interview that he had not returned to the property in several years.

Dunlap added that there was some local concern when the first house in Schorer’s development was under construction that the bold design could overshadow “what ought to be the main architectural event: Gropius’s quieter and more subtle Murchison House.”