William Morgan: Beautiful manufactured nostalgia

Summer by the Sea: Cottages from Watch Hill to Little Compton (Monacelli, $64.95) is an absolute stunner of a coffee-table book — eye candy at its best. In highlighting 16 shingled vacation houses stretched along the Rhode Island coast, architect Thomas A. Kligerman and photographer Read McKendree have captured the essence of summer along this shore. “The combination of history, geography, and architecture captures summer redolent of a sail in a wooden catboat, lying in the dunes on July Fourth, clambakes, rose hip jam, and rainy nights around a jigsaw puzzle spread across an old card table,’’ Mr. Kligerman writes.

These seaside cottages are not the wealthy mansions we associate with Newport, but rather comfortable, putatively unpretentious (we do expect families emerging right out of a Ralph Lauren tableau)–pine not mahogany. Kligerman is “drawn to a nearly unfettered American architecture, one that developed here in Rhode Island: the shingle style. Shingle is a key element in Kligerman’s own work–he even calls a huge house in Oyster Bay, on Long Island’s Gold Coast, “Shinglish.” (Picture just below.) One contemporary house is Kligerman’s own, Nushka Koo in Weekapaug, where he nails the spirit of the shingle style without resorting to his overblown, often grotesque recreations of the work of English architects such as Edwin Lutyens, C.F.A Voysey, and John Nash.

Oyster Bay Retreat, Long Island’s Gold Coast

Is there something more in this five-pound tome than Cottage porn? Fiddler’s Green, on Block Island, is the work of Peter Bohlin, one of the most serious designers of contemporary residences that combine modernism with tradition. Also, on Block Island is Jens Risom’s 1967 A-frame; the Danish designer was a founder of Knoll, the supplier of 20th-century modernist furniture. Many of the houses here appeal because they have been unchanged, but Boothden, the actor Edwin Booth’s 1883 home–the work of Calvert Vaux, the noted American architect who was co-designer of Central Park–got a makeover by David Andreozzi, an architect whose overblown shingled houses are too often more McMansion than the modest simplicity of its supposed inspiration.

The Cottage, Saunderstown

Muscovy Ridge, Watch Hill

The luscious, evocative photographs and the cozy writing (“The compact house wraps around the old tapered tower like a honey bear hugging a tree”) are seductive. And while it is refreshing that the houses are mostly smallish and unknown, Kligerman’s paean to these Rhode Island gems seems a little disingenuous given his career designing over-the-top bloated renditions of styles from the past. So, rue as we might the decline of serious architectural history,  we can enjoy the book as an exercise in manufactured nostalgia.

William Morgan, a Providence-based architectural historian, has published numerous books on the buildings and culture of New England (and elsewhere), including The Cape Cod Cottage and American Country Churches.