How the relaxed and informal Shingle Style came to be considered “the architecture of the American summer.”
Bruce Irving
The Shingle Style home is a seaside favorite.
Year in and year out, nothing says New England like a Cape Cod house.
Early Colonial homes may have been designed simple and solid to withstand harsh New England winters, but our fondness for the classic Cape Cod house style remains remarkably strong.
In New England’s coastal towns and cities, gracious sea captains’ homes were built as showcases of success, but as This Old House veteran Bruce Irving discovered, the full story is a little more complicated.
We in New England are surrounded by the handiwork of long-ago craftsmen. The gospel of old house “good stuff” according to This Old House’s Bruce Irving.
Early New Englanders invented the Cape Cod house out of necessity, but its charm and ingenuity made it an American icon.