Keep Our Place » 2006

Annual Meetings Inter-regnum

With the Scenic Block Island meeting coming up this Saturday and the Block Island Conservancy meeting the weekend following, it is time to take a break from posting to this web site. It is traditional to hand out the Keeper Tools cd’s at these meetings, and that requires some preparation…

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The Plot Thickens in Hingham

As always, there is more to the story than just houses. According to the Globe article, the small cluster of houses in the area had, for decades, shared a walkway to a beach. It turns out that the walkway is owned by three of the properties, including the one with the new house on it. The owners of the new house declared that their ownership rights included the right to restrict use of the walkway in ways that they proceeded to pronounce. The long-standing homeowners in the area did not agree. And so,

“In June 2004, with their house just completed, the [new owners] put up a fence - a waist-high, wooden barrier with a “No Trespassing” sign - that blocks Melville Walk…”

“A month later, when the [new owners] moved in, 17 neighbors were waiting for them on the beach, holding a silent vigil. [The new owners] called the police…”

“Two months later, [neighbors] who had enjoyed boating off the beach for 33 years, sued..”

The quoted reaction of the new owner? “If you havn’t been here for 50 years, they hate you. They hate new people. They hate young people. They hate people whose house is bigger than theirs.”

Tomorrow: “We love Hingham”

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“They Hate Us Because Our House Is Bigger Than Theirs”

Do house designs and attitude really go together? Almost always. Here is an example from the mainland, as reported by the Boston Globe (12 August 2006):

“For generations, families in the Crow Point section overlooking HIngham Harbor have swum at the narrow, rocky strip of sand at the end of Melville Walk.

“Then the Stimsons arrived.

“Robert Stimson, a financial analyst, and his wife, Cynthia, bought a plot of land on Melville Walk, tore down a 1920s cottage, and built a $1.3 million, 5,700-square-foot house.”

Based on just this amount of information, can you project how this turns out? We’ll look at more tomorrow.

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The Costs of Aloofness

Is there really anything wrong with rich people carving out pieces of Block Island and turning them in to their own not-so-little self-sufficient enclaves? They certainly give the builders a one-time boost (assuming they use an island builder) while they are creating their enclave. So, in the short term, enclaves may not impose a cost.

In the long term, however, enclaves are a disaster at an economic, social, and stewardship level. There are only two kinds of tourist destinations: those that are spoiled and those that are unspoiled. Block Island has been blissfully in the unspoiled category for most of the 20th century, while places like Watch Hill, across the sound on the mainland, have been pure enclaves that have zero tourist appeal. Big aggressive enclave houses are moving the island from the unspoiled category to the spoiled category. The island can survive the building of $100 million of new, respectful houses (where respectful does not mean cheap. some of the most expensive houses on the island are also models of respectfulness) and still be the island we know and love.

Tomorrow: “They hate us because our house is bigger than their’s.”

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Theory 4: It’s the Attitude Behind the House

Can a house express an attitude? If it can, does it matter? Yes, it can. And yes, it does. Consider that the average size of the island houses built from 1680 to 1980 is a bit above 1900 square feet. What does it mean (i.e. what does it communicate) when someone builds a large house bigger than 3,000 square feet?

If you ask them, they will invariably says it is all driven by family values. “I have a large family.” “I want room for the grandchildren some day.” If this is really the driving force, it will be obvious from the house design. Extra bedrooms will be tucked discreetly out back where they belong, not piled on top. The house will go out of its way to fit in, to be in keeping, in spite of its larger size. Said another way, the family values will extend to the island family, not just the nuclear family.

In a growing number of cases, however, talk of “family values” is a sham, a pretext for ostentation. The house is bigger and more visible than the true needs of the family require. Here the definition of family values in no way extends to the island family.

And it goes beyond just a failure to respect the island family. Implicit in these bloated houses is a distancing from the island itself. They are not houses on the island; they are islands of their own. They are enclaves that express their aloofness from the island.

Tomorrow: The Costs of Aloofness

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Fifty Thousand

Numbers like 50,000 are not currently used on Block Island. 50,000 is the volume, in cubic feet, of a large house. If you think back to high school algebra class, the cubic volume of a solid is calculated by measuring its width times its depth times its height. Take a good-sized 12×16 bedroom with a 9 foot celing. Its interior volume is 12 times 16 times 9, or a bit over 1,700 cubic feet. Add in the volume of its floor and its share of the walls and we might get up to, say, 2,500 square feet. So three of these large bedrooms, plus a bath or two, would be 10,000 cubic feet. Historically, island bedrooms are much smaller: 10×12 with an 8 foot celing is perfectly servicable. If you do the math, these are roughly half the cubic footage of the 12×16s. In fact, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, full houses on Block Island that are in the 10,0000 cubic foot range.

There are also a growing number of island dreadnoughts in the 50,000 to 110,000 cubic foot range, where the cubic footage includes all the volume from a roof or deck down to the ground, but excludes anything below ground level. If there is a 10,000 cubic foot detached garage with “bonus room” above ( you can see a mainland one at http://home.earthlink.net/~grleone/house/bonusroom.htm ) it is counted. But a garage below ground level is not. So cubic footage is quite a good predictor of the visual impact of a proposed house. And it is a good measure of the gratuitous bulk of such a house. A three-bedroom house can be quite comfortably put together in 20,000 to 25,000 cubic feet. The odds are good that such a house will be respectful of the island. Volume above that level is unlikely to look or feel respectful.

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Thirty-Five

Thirty-five is probably the most important number we have when it comes to the built environment on Block Island. The height of a house is limited to 35 feet. In future weeks, KeepOurPlace.com will deconstruct that height number in greater detail, but for starters assume that houses have nine foot ceilings and that the joists and floorboards that support the next floor up add another foot. So each story of a house uses up ten feet of height. Thus a three-story house is thirty feet plus the roof plus the part of the foundation that sticks out of the ground. It is typically not feasible to build a three story house on Block Island. (The mansard roof design is an obvious exception, since it incorporates a very shallow roof in a way that is consistent with the architecture of the downtown area.)

This brief analysis does, however, point up one of the quandaries that has been debated on the island for years: limits on building height create the temptation to use shallow non-Mansard roofs, where the steeply pitched roof is the tradition on the island. The need, of course, is to keep track of the eave height, the height at which the roof begins, as well as the ultimate height of the ridge pole.

There are also issues at the ground level. Issues like “what is the ground level”? Block Island building sites are rarely flat. Many homes have foundations fully in ground on one side, while fully exposed on the other. The island uses the average of the four corners of the houses. Even that is open to abuse. Unscrupulous owners are known to push dirt up against their foundations in order to get above 35 feet. There have even been cases of regrading entire lots, creating artificial knolls where none existed historically. The standard interpretation of “above ground level” is “above historical grade” which is documented in the USGS topographical survey of the island, but it is not clear if this has ever been tested.

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Three Thousand

There is currently no limitation on the number of square feet of floor space a Block Island house can have as long as the single story footprint stays within the four per cent limit. However, the average for all the houses built on the island from 1680 to 1980 was a bit over 1900 square feet. So a house of 3,000 square feet, while perhaps modest by emerging mainland standards, is big, and potentially disrespectfully big, by the standards of this small island.

And the number itself can be squishy. Usually, it means unheated interior space, so a large garage with a so-called “bonus room” on the second floor, which together are as big as many island homes, can count as zero square feet if the bonus room is unheated and used only in the summer time. (Note that such a garage and bonus room, carefully sited out back, can be a very appropriate and respectful way to accomodate occasional summer guests, but placed conspicuously in the foreground of a critical island viewshed can be another matter.) And so-called “cathedral ceilings” (”Either you worship God or you worship yourself.”) can add bulk to a house without adding square footage. Many communities do count such space double, but the Block Island assessors apparently do not.

Tomorrow: Thirty-five

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Theory 3: It’s the Numbers (Part One)

Three. Four. Three thousand. Thirty-five. Fifty thousand. Each are numbers that can be used to evaluate a house design. Three are currently on the books as town regulations; the other two are not. Several of these numbers turn out to be subject to interpretation and dispute. None of the five, of course, communicate anything about what a proposed house design actually looks like. Let’s look at the first two, then go on to the others in the days to come.

Three, the numbers of acres required for a lot of record, is unambiguous and well-established on Block Island. However, these lots of record are in the minority. The majority of the island’s actual lots are less than three acres. There is certainly potential here for oversight, since non-conforming lots can be treated differently from those of three acres or more.

Four, the per cent of a lot’s buildable area that can be filled by the so-called “footprint” of a building design, is also encoded in town regulations. (The footprint is the top-down size of the structure; it is what it looks like to Google Earth and is usually synonymous with the square footage of the foundation.) Four per cent of a minimum three-acre lot is an enormous number: more than 5,000 square feet. Considering that a house can go three stories, such a number has no real-world impact.

On Block Island, however, with its non-conforming lots and extensive wetlands, the four per cent number does come into play. Wetlands and the 50-foot collar around them are subtracted from the gross acreage. Developers pushed recently to get some of this space back into the four per cent calculation but the town, to its lasting benefit, resisted this weakening.

On the other hand, the four per cent number, used blindly, can act against the best interests of the island. Four per cent of the smallest island lots is a tiny number and it acts like a fist on a tube of toothpaste. Squeeze the footprint and there’s no place to go but up. A house that would be more respectful if it were longer and lower is forced into the mushroom category.

Tomorrow: Three Thousand.

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Theory Two: “It’s the Stewardship That Matters”

A recent conversation with an islander got around to her displeasure at those who “are against big houses.” She comes from a large family and made it clear that nobody was going to tell her that she could not have big family gatherings.

The conversation brought to mind the words of an Episcopal minister many years ago: “Either you worship God or you worship yourself.” Block Island is not God, but it is sacred ground: it is God’s work at its finest. We each need to decide for ourselves, which takes priority, me or Block Island. If the answer is “me”, as it seems to be on the mainland and some of our neighboring islands, then stewardship goeth out the window.

If the answer is “Block Island comes first and I come second”, that does not mean 900 square foot Berger houses in perpetuity. It certainly does mean, however, thinking hard about the five or six days out of 365 that there will be extra guests on the island. Having them stay at a local bed & breakfast is triple stewardship. It eliminates the need for superfluous house bulk, it helps the island economy year in and year out, and it gives the guests a fuller exposure to Block Island. If that is impractical (really?), then the location of virtually-always-empty extra bedrooms becomes paramount. Piling them mindlessly on top does not answer the needs of good stewardship. Tucking them out back, or even in a separate structure, can be a wonderful answer.

A house does not have to be tiny to be island-appropriate. If it is getting above 3000 square feet, however, it needs to be done with great care.

Unless, of course, the only thing that is important is “me.”

Tomorrow: “It’s the Numbers That Matter”

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