A coastal house on a small lot, Fairfield

Some coastal houses have room to spread along the water. This one did not. In Fairfield, on a small lot near the shore, Lucien Vita designed a house of about 2,800 square feet that had to fit its rooms, its height and its character inside close limits. New England Home told its story in August 2019, under the title “Worth the Wait in Fairfield.”

Two sources, one house

Lucien gave the magazine a one-sentence description of the firm’s approach to houses like this: “Our firm tries to mix inspirations from the classic beach house vernacular with more contemporary concepts,” he said.

The two halves of that sentence divide the house cleanly. The beach-house vernacular is in what you see first: the character of the exterior and the familiar coastal forms that let the house sit easily among older ones on a shore street. The contemporary concepts are in how the house is put together and how its main floor is used.

Steel for an open floor

The clearest contemporary decision is in the structure. Steel supports the open main floor.

On a small lot, walls are expensive. Every interior wall that holds up the floor above takes area, divides light and fixes where furniture can go. Carrying the load on steel instead lets the main floor stay open from one side to the other, so the main rooms share one space and one run of windows. In a house of 2,800 square feet, that openness is what makes the main floor feel larger than its plan. It also lets daylight travel further across the plan.

The beach-house exterior and the steel interior do not contradict each other. One answers to the street. The other answers to how the family lives.

The attic, used

The second decision is at the top of the house. The attic became an office.

The article describes the attic and zoning constraints the design had to work within. On a small lot, zoning limits how big and how tall a house can be, and the space under a pitched roof is one of the few places left to gain a room without enlarging the footprint. A pitched roof, the kind a beach house calls for, leaves height beneath it. Turning that space into an office gives the house a working room set apart from the main floor, and takes advantage of the roof the exterior already needed.

A colour in the stair

A small detail carries the contemporary half of the sentence into the circulation: a blue stair rail. One strong colour on the stair marks the route between floors and gives the vertical movement through the house its own presence. It is a modest choice, and a clear one.

Small lot, full house

The lesson of this house is about scale. Nothing in it is oversized, yet it holds an open main floor, the rooms above it and a working office under the roof, inside the limits of a small coastal lot.

A team of separate firms

This house was not built by Vita. The published design credit names Lucien Vita, founder of Vita Design Group. Construction was by Coastal Luxury Homes, the interiors by Shelter Interiors and the landscape by Seventy Acres. The magazine’s photographs are by John Gould Bessler, and the article covers the homeowners’ and the interior designers’ decisions as well as Lucien’s.

That arrangement was common in the years before Vita Design Group began building its own houses in 2016, and it still describes how many good houses in Fairfield County get made: an architect, a builder and an interior designer, each from a separate firm, working on one house. The value of a clear architectural idea in that setting is that each firm can see where its own work fits.

Where the house sits in the chapter

Beside Dockside and the Riverside Avenue house, the Fairfield house is the quiet case. It does not stack four floors or fold its walls away. It shows how a small coastal house can hold on to the character of a beach house while using steel and a working attic to live like a larger, more open one.

Read the article at New England Home. Return to Chapter I: Waterfront.