THERE’S A COMMON belief among many longtime New Yorkers that, in order to love the city, you have to leave it regularly. For the minimalist residential and commercial architect Robert Finger, 57, that’s long meant escaping to his family’s Cape Cod cottage, built circa 1918 in the dunes along the Atlantic Ocean in Wellfleet, Mass., which he first visited when he was a month old. Every summer, his parents and two older sisters would drive up from Bethesda, Md., for “two months of never wearing shoes,” he recalls over a late breakfast on the house’s weathered gray deck. “ ‘Sunblock’ wasn’t a word I understood, and I remember the feeling at the end of summer: Putting on proper clothes felt so harsh.”
After inheriting the home two decades ago from his mother, who inherited it from her own mother three decades before that, he seeks that barefoot feeling whenever he can, much to the surprise of the people with whom he works. His employees sometimes ask whether the un-air-conditioned place is uncomfortable — “miserable” is their word of choice — to which he says, “Yeah.” His clients, many of whom are Manhattan real estate developers with more comfortable second homes, don’t believe him when he describes the cabin or shows them pictures. “They have an impression of me as someone who does exquisite, refined work, and they see what looks like clutter everywhere,” he says. “But I need a balance, a separation — that’s why you get out of the city so often.”
The shack was all but invented for escaping society’s expectations. It was constructed more than a century ago by Finger’s great-aunt Adelaide Newhall, who after graduating from Smith in 1906 decided that, instead of getting married or having children, she would become a teacher and artist. When she was growing up in Worcester, Mass., her family would take a summer rental nearby: This region, known as the Outer Cape, is mostly protected national seashore, meaning that the only view you have from the house is of a high, seagrass-covered sand embankment leading down to a chilly ocean that, despite the increasing presence of sharks, is more or less your own. Newhall chose the spot because it was ideal for creating the plein-air paintings that established her alongside her teachers Charles Hawthorne and Jerry Farnsworth as part of the Cape Cod School of Art, whose naturalist folk works have recently become desirable in certain American collecting circles.
Whenever one of her hundred or so oil paintings becomes available at auction, Finger and his siblings buy it back in hopes of eventually establishing a complete collection. Some of the pieces — portraits of dignified-looking strangers; boat-filled seascapes — are hung in the cabin on wooden walls and shelves crowded with shells, vintage china, books and other bric-a-brac that were brought into the open downstairs area over the past hundred years and then never left. Most of the items and furniture, from old carved wooden dressers to colorfully repainted tables and rocking chairs, belonged to Newhall, who died in 1960 and left the house to her sister. Since Finger took it over, he has mostly removed things. “It was packed with what my parents thought were conveniences: card tables, a lot of kitchen stuff, extra chests of drawers,” he says. “Everything has [to have] some heavy meaning to it, otherwise I’m not really interested.”
But he works through these decisions carefully. The home — a 900-square-foot box with a lofted sleeping nook for four up near the rafters of its shingled triangular roof — looks like the kind a child might draw, with a bright red front door flanked by a pair of white four-pane windows. It’s crafted the way a child might, too: The outside is all cedar; the inside is all exposed Douglas fir timber; there are no center beams or ridge poles and “there are things you can’t remove,” Finger says, “or it’ll fall apart.”
He did make a few strategic changes. The house is uninsulated so, two years ago, he replaced the fireplace with a wood stove that allows him to spend the chillier months of April and November there. He also renovated the downstairs bathroom and, after considering it for a decade, finally redid the kitchen, installing a cast-iron range from the British company Aga that not only felt period appropriate but came with a slumber function that provides ambient heat while people sleep above it. The only new furniture he’s added is upstairs — two twin beds from Design Within Reach in a cherry red metal that complements the turquoise-painted wooden floor, near a bathroom with no door that, he notes, “seems really ridiculous in front of your friends — except when it’s the middle of the night.”
LATELY, THOUGH, FINGER’S had practice sharing the small space in new ways. After getting divorced last decade, he met a new partner on a dating app during the pandemic, a widowed 55-year-old landscape and furniture designer named Robert Remer, who has since lent his own taste and expertise to the house. (The wood stove was his idea.) In October 2020, the Roberts came here for their third date. “It was raining that night, and we arrived in the dark and Robert starts throwing open all the windows,” Remer says. “ ‘Wait a minute,’ I thought. But then I realized it’s a house without heating, so it gets musty if it’s not aired out, like a tent. And there’s no difference between the outside and inside temperature anyway.”
To them, that’s not a deterrent. The same untrammeled nature that first drew Newhall and countless others here is what keeps the couple coming back. “At work, we talk about bringing nature into the space, but here it’s always there,” Finger says. “The wind is coming through or the humidity is oppressive or it’s so dense with fog that you can’t see the ocean.”
In 2022, the two men married and bought a home together in Manhattan’s West Village, a 19th-century mill building — “a little ship in the city,” Remer calls it — of which the Cape Cod place feels a natural extension. “It’s two houses, but really it’s one house. This is the garden for the house in the city,” says Remer. He’s made only minor changes to its brushy quarter-acre of land, cleaning up a bramble of deadwood yet leaving the meadows and knotty beach pines intact. For now, the couple’s shared instinct, as with the interior, has been to leave it be; as Finger sees it, “anything you’re adding seems unnecessary.”
The environment, after all, will do what it wants. The dune is getting steeper every year, the result of accelerating erosion. A neighboring house was recently dismantled because it was about to fall over the edge, and Finger’s home was already moved back from the shore once. Here on the federally protected land, he explains, when you buy a house, you don’t really buy a house — you just get a letter that suspends it from condemnation. Nature will eventually take over and, when that happens, he says, “you just shake your fist at the heavens.” In other words, the place is yours — until it belongs to someone else. And then one day, it’ll belong only to the earth itself.
The post A Cape Cod Beach Shack Where Charm Takes Priority Over Air Conditioning appeared first on New York Times.
