THE EVER-ENDURING CAPE COD HOUSE • Designed with simple practicality,
it is a quintessential standard-bearer of all things home
sk an american child to draw
a house, and chances are pretty
high you’ll get a crayoned image
of a Cape Cod style. The simple
form is New England’s gift to the
collective consciousness, and the
collective has rewarded it with
what may turn out to be eternal
life. Evidence of the enduring
popularity of the Cape Cod house is everywhere, from the
crank-’em-out versions of Levittown to the graceful mid-century interpretations by architect Royal Barry Wills to the
little green houses we trade for hotels in Monopoly.
A
Funny thing is, no one is really quite sure whether the
Cape originated on Cape Cod. There are very old — dating
to the 17th century — examples of the style in Connecticut,
on Massachusetts’s Cape Ann, and in Maine. Some historians
trace the style to stone cottages of a similar shape in Devon
and Cornwall in the west of England, from whence some of
the earliest New England colonists hailed.
The Cape Cod house didn’t get its name until 1821,
when Timothy Dwight, a president of Yale, christened the
type in his book Travels in New England and New York. “The
houses in Yarmouth are inferior to those in Barnstable,” he
opined, “and much more generally of the class which may
be called with propriety Cape Cod houses.” He goes on to
a typical full cape
has a center chimney
and a center entry
with a pair of windows
on each side. Doghouse
dormers are a
conventional addition
that create more
useable space on the
second floor.
