Southampton Arts Center Architecture Tour and Talk Focus on Shingle Style

The Southampton Art Center’s annual Architecture + Design Tour returns Friday, June 16, for its sixth edition — this time with a focus on shingle style architecture.

The tour includes four Southampton Village homes, the oldest dating back to 1887 and restored in 1997, and the newest built just a few years ago. During a panel at the arts center moderated by local architect Siamak Samii, Samii and fellow architects who are well versed in working in shingle style will discuss the modern evolution of shingle style architecture, a distinctly American style that has been ubiquitous on the South Fork for well more than a century.

In interviews last week, the panelists shared the benefits of shingle style architecture, the challenges and why even though the style has gone out of fashion at times, it always comes back into vogue.

One house on the tour — the addresses are kept confidential prior to the tour — is by John David Rose, an architect with an eponymous firm in the village who will serve on the panel. He worked with contractor HF Swanson and landscape architect Ed Hollander on the home, which was completed in 1999 and continues to be owned by the same family who commissioned it.

“It was a beautiful piece of property, and not too many people were doing shingle style like that at that time,” Rose recalled. He said the house is “timeless.”

“One of the biggest compliments people can pay us is that after the house is about a year old, they don’t know if it’s a brand new house or if it’s a hundred-year-old house,” he said.

Shingle style architecture rose to prominence beginning in the 1880s. Though it is often associated with New England, the South Fork is another region where architects pioneered shingle style.

“I often compare the shingle style to a button-down shirt,” Rose said. “They go in and out of style, but they always come back — for good reason. They physically work, they keep your collar in place, and it’s neat and tidy. I’m not saying the shingle style is neat and tidy, but I believe it comes back and has remained so strong for maybe different reasons than other architects.”

Before he was an architect, he was a builder, he explained. “My father was a builder, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and way, way back, so I was always exposed to shingle style,” he said. “I had my hands on it, was helping repair them and build them. It’s a certain style because it functions really well.”

Rose said modern homes are quite lovely, but the fact is snow and water don’t run off a flat roof well at all.

“They don’t hold up like they should,” he said of flat-roofed homes. “If you research Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, it was built in one of the zones that has the most snowfall of any place in the country, but it’s a flat roof. And by the way, it’s had major structural problems. A fantastic building, but perhaps not the most appropriate for that snow zone.”

The East End gets half as much snowfall, on average, as Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, does. But, Rose noted, the East End also gets hurricanes.

With wind and snow concerns, the shingle style’s pitched roofs with big overhangs are appealing. Another appeal, according to Rose, is the cedar shingle, one of the prominent materials in shingle style. Used as wall cladding material, cedar shingles, in theory, last forever, or at least the lifetime of the owner, he said.

“Certainly, in this day and age, we’re having a major problem with finding people to do maintenance,” Rose pointed out. “So if you can find any material that’s maintenance free or almost maintenance free, that’s a great material. That’s always been the case. It’s only somewhat recent that people are staining them or having synthetic plastic shingles that look like a cedar shingle.”

Paints and stains are not what they used to be, he cautioned, noting that the lion’s share, for the sake of the environment, are water based rather than oil based and don’t hold up as long.

“You can let a normal cedar shingle go and do nothing to it ever. Do not power wash it. Just leave it alone,” he said.

As for cedar shingles on roofs, there are two reasons why new cedar shingles don’t last as long as their forebears did, one being that new-growth cedar is not of the same quality and durability as old-growth cedar. The second reason, according to Rose, is new energy codes.

“Our buildings are super insulated so the backside of a lot of the shingles aren’t breathing like they used to,” he said. “Back in the day when I worked with my dad, we put roof shingles, cedar roof shingles, on lathe, or skip sheathing, and what it did is it exposed the underside of them, and the air in the attic would dry it and it wouldn’t rot out. But now you don’t have that. Nowadays, the attics are heated or air conditioned like the first and second floor.”

Another upside for Rose is that shingle style lends itself to covered and screened-in porches.

“I do sleeping porches in almost every home I do, of any of the bigger homes, because it’s a great place,” he said. “It’s usually off the master bedroom or the main bedrooms. It’s a place back in the day — when they didn’t have heating and air conditioning — they pulled their bed out there and slept there because the salt air was supposedly healthy for you. We now have air conditioning and heat, but those sleeping porches are being used. My clients are out there reading a book, having a drink, watching the sun set or rise. We put in screen panels in the summer, storm panels in the winter.”

Because shingle style is so popular, it has become a favorite of spec builders who don’t use architects or use the same plans over and over, Rose said. “The spec market has taken some of the easier pieces — the low hanging fruit, if you will — out of the shingle-style world of columns and overhangs and gambrel roofs and they’ve just beat it to death.”

“They’ve diluted it quite frankly,” he said, “and I think that’s one of the biggest changes.”

Ross Padluck, a partner at the Manhattan-based firm Kligerman Architecture & Design, said shingle style grew out of humble beginnings and the necessity of simple building materials.

“The overlapping shingles were a way to weatherproof their structures — homes and barns and outbuildings and things like that — from the elements,” he said of people in the 17th and 18th centuries. “And that style has kind of evolved from these very humble domestic buildings to much more elaborate shingle style homes.”

People would build their homes from whatever was available.

“Back then it would have been local cedar trees, which was probably eastern white cedar on Long Island,” Padluck said. “We typically use Alaskan yellow cedar right now, which is more readily available, and people use western red as well.”

Though synthetic building materials have become commonplace, cedar persists.

“There’s no substitute for the real thing,” Padluck said. “There’s a number of reasons why you would still want to use cedar shingles. One is the aesthetics of it. You can’t replicate it, even with a synthetic material. There’s stuff that comes close, but nothing’s quite the same. And it’s a living material so it will change over time — it’ll patina, it’ll weather over time, it will change color over time — and you just don’t get that with a synthetic material. It’s naturally rot and insect resistant, which is why it’s been a favorite for hundreds of years. And it’s a natural material. It’s biodegradable. So when it’s time to change out those shingles, they will biodegrade in the earth. And it’s not plastic or some other synthetic material that’s going to be in a landfill for 5,000 years. It’s a great durable building material that’s sort of time tested for hundreds of years in this country.”

In the 1880s, when architects and firms such as McKim, Mead & White, Peabody and Stearns and Frank Lloyd Wright were working in shingle style, it took on a very interesting evolution, Padluck said.

Cedar shingles went from being a necessity as a cladding material to much more decorative, he explained. “There were decorative patterns, different arrangements, the way the forms of the buildings changed and the way shingles sort of became a skin on buildings,” he said. “And now with modern waterproofing, we don’t necessarily need it for waterproofing purposes.”

He believes one reason shingle style has endured when there are cheaper options out there is nostalgia for memories of summers past and summer homes. In popular summer destinations in the Northeast, cedar shingles are the local building material, he said. “And when you think of summer, you think of those shingled homes that you stayed in or vacationed in and/or hotels that you went to.”

Panelist Gary L. Brewer is a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which designed one of the homes on the tour. He explained how shingle style has gone in and out of favor.

“Historically, out in the Hamptons, there are historic shingle houses from the 1880s to 1900, and shingle as a material on houses probably continued until the 1920s,” he said. “But with the advent of modernism, say from the 1950s to the 1970s, newer houses that were built in the Hamptons were mostly modern in character. But with the return of tradition and postmodernism, I would say that starting in the 1970s and on, there was quite an interest in reviving the shingle style. First it was done mostly by materials — using shingles — but say by the ’80s, and certainly into the ’90s, there were more literate shingle style houses being designed and built.”

And by more literate, he explained, he means houses that looked like they were from the turn of the 20th century with traditional details and windows and classical columns.

And now that development in the Hamptons has exploded, Brewer said, shingle style appears to be the style of choice.

Like Rose, Brewer observed that builders sometimes working without the benefit of an architect are building “shingle-like houses” that range from not-so-good to OK.

The more architects see this happening, they more inclined they are to do modern homes or even more traditional-style shingle homes, according to Brewer.

“For somebody who’s doing a one-of-a-kind house in the Hamptons, the goal is to do a house that doesn’t look like a spec shingle style house,” he said.

He compared spec houses to the pattern book houses that were available to American builders up until the 1930s or so.

“Builders had access to relatively good plans for American houses, and an assortment of different styles, not just shingle style,” he said. “And so all over America there are really wonderful, traditional houses that were done without architects and was the result of quite a robust pattern-book house industry. I think that the spec houses in the Hamptons, kind of fall within that sort of genre. Some of them are not so great and some of them are perfectly OK. But I think that if you compare them to the turn-of-the-century houses in the Hamptons, those houses were more one-of-a-kind houses for patrons, as opposed to houses that were, say, meant for the masses, so to speak.”

Brewer said shingle style is particular to the area. “It’s a regional style. In a world today where you can go to any city and new buildings all look the same — you know, the criticism is that one city looks exactly the same as another city — and the shingle style is unique to the Hamptons, and doing new shingle style houses in that style is carrying on an architectural tradition that’s special to the Hamptons.”

With the rise of the press and magazines in the 1830s, there was a parade of popular house styles, and the shingle style was one of them, Brewer said. Magazines published the latest designs for shingle houses, and any place that was thriving and building in that period was influenced by what was in style, he explained. “And so, the shingle style isn’t just particular out east. It’s also in places like Maine or New Hampshire, but you can also find shingle style houses in Providence or even on the West Coast or in the Midwest. It was a style that was fashionable, and if you were building at that time, often you would just follow the fashions.”

One reason he finds shingle style appealing is that, with its materials, it has a naturalistic feeling and a rustic, back-to-nature character, he said.