Carolina Architecture & Design ‘Three Stories, Shingle Style’

Feature Article

Three Stories, Shingle Style

Like an athlete challenged by the rules of the game, Connecticut-based architect Mark Finlay is at his best when challenged to design homes that not only delight his clients, but satisfy stringent architectural restrictions as well. Finlay’s talent for creating truly exceptional homes within prevailing community guidelines has made him a favorite architect on Kiawah Island, S.C., where the local architectural review board closely oversees residential development.

For a recent Kiawah project, Finlay literally overturned traditional design conventions to plan a home that meets the owners’ needs with style and grace while playing by the island’s rules governing such details as square footage, percentage of lot coverage, maximum height, architectural character, colors, and materials.

“This is an upside-down house,” says Finlay. “From the front, you walk into the lower level foyer. You have to go upstairs to reach the main level.”

The 6,400-square-foot house, which two business partners own jointly as a vacation home, has two master bedroom suites—one on the main level and the other on a level above. Also on the main level are a great room, dining room, and kitchen. The third-floor master suite has a fully equipped exercise room with a spectacular ocean view.

The home’s lower level has a library and two guest bedroom suites opening onto a poolside deck. To adhere to federal flood insurance regulations—as Finlay says all his projects do—the lower level is approximately 11 feet above the base flood elevation.

“The trick was to fit three floors within the federal regulations and the island’s 40-foot height restriction and still make this massive house look comfortable and approachable,” Finlay says. “We accomplished that by using a series of subtle details that start big and work their way down. The closer you get, the better the house gets. The final outcome is very pleasing.”

For builder Steve Koenig, the project’s many details presented a number of construction challenges, but based on his experience building several other Finlay-designed homes, Koenig knew every detail would be thoroughly documented. “The house is very intricate, but the drawings reflect that,” Koenig says.

Finlay began his work on the house by programming the interior space. Central to the plan was a great room/dining room/kitchen combination. “Many people are turning their backs on the traditional separate living room and dining room because they realize they don’t really use them,” Finlay notes. “The owners want to live in all the spaces all the time.”

Although he did not see the furnishings before drawing his plans—most pieces had not yet been purchased—Finlay knew the homeowners wanted to furnish the home with an eclectic mix of antiques, reproductions, and art. “I knew the furniture and accessories would dictate the character of each room, so I kept the interiors simple,” he says.

Finlay specified recessed lighting throughout the house. “The main idea was to make the lighting unobtrusive,” says lighting consultant Susan Barrineau, who supplied many of the home’s light fixtures.

Since the owners enjoy collecting art, Barrineau helped customize interior lighting to emphasize specific paintings. “They gave me the sizes of all their pictures, and I made sure they had the correct lighting to highlight them,” she says. By using the clear reflectors Finlay specified for ambient lighting, Barrineau says, “we eliminated light pockets on the ceiling. When the light comes on, it fills the area without drawing attention to the light source.”

“With the lighting, we always try to design in flexibility and build in lots of options,” adds Finlay. “Everything is on dimmers so you can easily change the mood of any room by adjusting the switches.”

The ceiling fans, also supplied by Barrineau, are meant to be as unobtrusive as possible. “In this climate, people like having ceiling fans,” she notes. “The ones in this house blend in with the ceiling.”

Interior designer Peggy Norris worked with the owners to create a subdued color palette to complement the dark red specified for the great room, dining room and kitchen walls. “Red can be a strong color,” says Norris, “and we had to consider it all over the house.”

Norris used reds, blacks, and whites in the main floor master bedroom, with taupes and beiges predominant in the hallways and guest bedrooms. “They wanted the bedrooms to feel peaceful and calm,” she says, “so we kept the bedroom colors especially subdued.”

To complement the red walls in the great room, Norris used muted gold and beige-toned upholstery fabrics. Two matching sofas, chosen for their depth and comfort, are covered in woven chenille. “They like to lie down and watch television in there,” explains Norris, “so I wanted the sofas and the pillows to be soft and cuddly.”

Facing one of the sofas, an upholstered chair Norris says “was designed for the woman of the house” has a matching round ottoman. “We wanted it to look interesting, so we put fringe around the ottoman,” notes Norris. An upholstered chaise faces the other sofa.

The great room’s cocktail table is built around an antique iron gate from Mexico, visible through the table’s glass top. A round fluted pedestal table, featuring a banded plank top and a tobacco-colored finish, serves as an end table for the two sofas.

One wall of the great room has custom-built cabinets holding a big-screen television and home-theater audio equipment. To the left of the television, the cabinets contain a wet bar and a bar refrigerator, with storage space for glassware and serving platters to the right. The great room cabinets, built by Christopher Peacock Cabinetry, are finished in a deep red glaze, applied by hand.

To tie the rich reds of the wall with rust tones in oriental rugs purchased for the house by the owners, Norris mixed a custom stain for the salvaged antique heart-of-pine flooring used throughout the house. “The floors had to be the perfect combination of red and rust,” she explains. “By blending several different stains, I came up with a color that worked with the walls and the rugs.”

An intricately carved wooden chandelier with 18 shaded lights dominates the dining area. The owners purchased the chandelier, the carved table, and the matching buffet, and Norris found dining room chairs to complement them. The chair seats are upholstered in distressed leather, while the backs are covered with a colorful fabric. “We thought the leather would wear well over the years,” explains Norris, “and the back has a gorgeous fabric that picks up on all the colors in the room and ties them together.” A painting by a favorite artist hangs over the buffet.

In the large adjoining kitchen, featuring commercial-grade appliances, Finlay specified custom cabinets by Christopher Peacock Cabinetry. “We wanted brand-new, old-looking cabinets that would capture a feeling of age and permanence,” says Finlay.

To achieve the effect, Peacock created a hand-glazed, translucent antique cream-colored finish for the cabinets and topped them with polished granite countertops. The finish requires seven layers, including a primer, base coat, scumble glaze, and a final protective topcoat. The cabinets have recessed panel doors and drawers with applied single astragal molding and wainscot end paneling. The glass cabinet doors have individual panes held in with a glazing bead. The backsplash tiles are handmade.

After considerable research, the owners found the kitchen’s antique light fixtures at a shop in New York. “They were quite proud of finding the kitchen light fixtures, and I think they look great,” says Norris.

For the main floor master bedroom, Norris suggested a massive wooden bed with leather studded inserts on the headboard and footboard. A red club chair and ottoman by the bed provide a favorite place for reading.

The main floor’s master bath has hand-glazed cabinets, supplied by the builder, colored to complement the stone slab countertops and flooring.

Below the main floor, the cherry-paneled library opens onto the pool deck. A generously cushioned leather sofa and a leather recliner provide comfortable seating, while a table with four chairs is ideal for card and board games. “The table and chairs belonged to the owner’s mother, and he wanted to use them in the house,” says Norris. “We had them refinished and reupholstered the chairs with leather seats and heavy woven fabric backs.”

The owners purchased the painting hanging above the library mantel. Norris says they also bought a sisal rug, bordered with fabric, “to brighten up the room.”

On either side of the library, two lower-level guest suites border the deck. “One of the guest baths opens directly onto the deck, so it can be used as a pool bath and shower facility,” notes Koenig.

The deck extends around the house as a wrap-around front porch. “On the lower level, you can walk all the way around the outside of the house under a cover,” notes Finlay.

The pool, built flush with the deck, rests on a block wall constructed on a poured concrete footing beneath the deck. “Most pools on the island are elevated—some as high as 12 to 15 feet off the ground because of the flood zone,” says pool contractor Earl Fore of Aqua Blue Pools, Inc. Next to the pool, Fore installed a deck-level hot tub.

Temperatures, lighting and water valves for both the pool and the hot tub are computer-controlled. Among the other amenities the owners selected for the pool are an automatic cleaner and a salt chlorination system. “The system converts salt to chlorine and maintains it at a constant level,” explains Fore. “The water feels softer, and it’s much easier on the skin.” The pool walls and bottom are colored dark gray and trimmed in ceramic tile. “The dark bottom gives the water better reflecting properties than a lighter color,” explains Fore.

The lower level also has a kitchenette, adjacent to the pool, with a large built-in gas grill, refrigerator and prep area. “As we began to program the house, we realized the main kitchen was a level off the first floor deck,” recalls Finlay. “With their lifestyle, the owners realized they’d be entertaining a lot on that level. That’s where the idea for the kitchenette came from.”

The home’s exterior design is striking in its use of gothic arches, flared rooflines, brackets and shingle detailing. “The exterior fell into place once the interior plan was resolved,” says Finlay.

The exterior is covered with red cedar shingles, coated with a clear preservative. The decks are made of ipe, a South American hardwood more commonly known as ironwood. “This wood is so dense with natural oil, it doesn’t require treatment,” says Koenig. “It’s impervious to rot and insect damage.”

Koenig says one of the construction challenges was to find a framing crew able to handle the detail work as well—tasks normally handled separately by two different crews. “Before the roof could go on, some of the fascia work had to be done, so it would have been difficult to coordinate two crews,” explains Koenig. “Fortunately, I was able to hire one crew capable of doing the entire structure, including the shell, the windows, the decks, and the exterior finishes.”

Koenig says the architect remained heavily involved as construction progressed. “Mark Finlay was very conscientious and made frequent trips to Kiawah,” recalls Koenig.

“The clients were extremely active and interested, as well as very knowledgeable of the building process,” he adds. “They made changes along the way that transformed it from a house to their home.”

At the clients’ request, Koenig installed a ground loop geothermal heating and cooling system. “The typical home today uses heat pumps to extract heating and cooling from the outside air,” says Koenig. “This system extracts from the ground instead of the air.” To install the system, Koenig’s crew sank a dozen 200-feet-deep wells and installed closed plastic loops in each one. Water circulating through the loops stabilizes to the ground temperature to heat and cool the house.

Inside, the house is fully wired for technology. “They specified sophisticated wiring harnesses that incorporate fiber optic, telephone, and television cable in a single combined cable,” says Koenig. “We used one large package of wiring so you can access the Internet, the telephone, and cable television at points throughout the house.”

As Koenig continues building, primarily on Kiawah and Seabrook islands, he says the trend is moving toward tighter architectural restrictions for new construction. “At one point, there was a single set of guidelines,” he recalls. “Now, as developers release more land, they come with more stringent restrictions.”

In particular, Koenig says maximum heights for structures are being lowered enough to restrict plans to two floors, and size limits for new homes make it difficult to find an island building lot where a home larger than 6,000 square feet can be built. “This house could not have been built on some of the newer releases,” observes Koenig.

Koenig is currently working on a new development of his own on Kiawah. Mark Finlay is one of only three architects approved to design homes there.