Turkel Design Creates a Coastal Modern Retreat in Aquinnah

A view from the rock garden and exterior sitting area highlights the modified post-and-beam’s hemlock upper ceiling, which is supported by Douglas fir beams.

A horizontal datum stretches across the house’s lower mass, defining the lower roof.

Sliding screens positioned over the primary bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows provide privacy, though they can be moved when desired.Sliding screens positioned over the primary bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows provide privacy, though they can be moved when desired.

This modern summer home has a traditional entrance, though on a beautiful day, you can step straight from the driveway onto the oak floor of the living room and then outside for views of the Atlantic beyond.

Drywall for the interior ceiling and a stucco finish for the lower roof’s underside creates a continuous indoor/outdoor white plane. The roof overhang allows for an additional spatial layer between the house and the sliding screens so people can move between rooms via the outside.

The former director of architecture and design at MOMA once wrote, of the architect Richard Neutra, “It is possible to sit in a Neutra living room and wish that one could get indoors.” But the Veil House in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard suggests that there’s no such thing as too much outside in. Here, thanks to glass doors that retract into walls, interior spaces are entirely contiguous with the tupelo- and black-oak-studded landscape. You cannot only sit on the living room sofa and see the nearby ocean, you can smell and feel the salt air.

That pleasure could have come with a price. Salt air can do a number on a house, and local ordinances limit glass to fifty percent of ocean-facing walls. For some, that means building big, but not for these owners, a doctor and visual artist, who wanted a modest summer home.

Turkel Design turned these challenges into assets. The firm designed a house with two simple volumes—a great room in a central, soaring vertical space and three bedrooms on either end of a lower horizontal form. The entire seaside facade is glass with minimal oak cladding and moveable slatted wood screens that provide the required coverage.

Resilient materials abound including thermally modified hemlock for the screens, the great room ceiling, and select walls. Joel Turkel, the firm’s cofounder and creative director, explains that when heated, the cellulose of this rich brown wood turns into inorganic material, making it less attractive to bugs and less susceptible to rot. The interior’s palette is otherwise light, including a delicate whitewash for the oak casework.

The entire home is prefab, perhaps a shock if that word makes you picture, as Turkel says, “a big box rolling down the highway.” Turkel Design stopped building on-site twenty years ago, opting instead for the predictability of costs, material, quality, and outcome that comes when the home’s components are designed on a computer, fabricated by partners across North America, and then shipped in flat containers for assembly on-site, in this case by Larry Schubert of LHS Carpentry of West Tisbury. The result, says Turkel, is a prefab that is “virtually unlimited in terms of architecture” and that can go anywhere, even a remote island bluff.

Project Team
Architecture: Turkel Design
Builder: LHS Carpentry
Landscape design: Crosswater Landscape