Building a Better Cottage
By Clare Kittredge
A Lake Sunapee home now makes the most of the view and
fits perfectly into the neighborhood.
Built according to an open space concept, the living
room, dining room and kitchen of Chasity and Peter’s vacation home open
onto each other and offer generous views of Lake Sunapee.
In the Newbury neighborhood
of Blodgett Landing, residents are close. Not only have their families known
one another for generations, but the Victorian cottages there today are on land
that was previously designated for a religious community’s tent sites.
“The property setbacks are
only four feet – meaning that each person’s building had to be four feet from
the property line, so eight feet away,” says Jeremy Bonin, the principal
partner / lead architect of Bonin Architects & Associates, PLLC in New
London. “It’s unique on Lake Sunapee.”
So when Chasity and Peter
wanted to renovate their Blodgett Landing space to accommodate their
four boys and friends while capitalizing on the Lake view, they knew the
project wouldn’t be run of the mill.
To achieve these goals, Bonin
developed plans to take down the existing cottage – with its rear-facing living
space and a stairway that blocked the lake view – and build a tall, narrow,
gray-clapboarded lakefront house that melds with its neighbors.
“Blodgett Landing residents
prefer that you stay in building guidelines – steep gables, intricate detail
work on porches, brackets,” Bonin says. “These are Victorian details but on a
different scale from a typical Victorian house. These are Victorian cottages.”
Read more at New Hampshire magazine.
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