When my husband and I bought our first house together, we were mainly thrilled to be saying goodbye to apartment living. Sure, we had a basic wish list of what we wanted our house to have — a backyard, second bathroom, a finished basement — but as far as what the house actually looked like, we kept an open mind.
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So it was a happy turn of events that we ended up buying an adorable Cape Cod in Staten Island, New York. This style of home does indeed get its name from those early 17th-century New England homes with gabled roofs that could stand up to ferocious weather, particularly during the winter.
“Cape-style homes are evocative of a simpler time,” says Eugene Colberg, principal of Colberg Architecture. “There is a nostalgia and an ease in the layout, often a small structure with a few rooms and stairs in the middle.”
Yup, sounds like the home of yours truly. Allow me to share with you a few reasons I’m crazy about our Cape.
The Pros of Living in a Cape
A Cape Cod creates instant curb appeal.
I know I’m partial, but I do believe that the classic Cape Cod architecture makes for one of the prettiest homes on any block. The sloping roof is striking, and the front door at the center offers a pleasing symmetry to the exterior.
Many Cape Cods also feature second-floor dormers — those are the tiny spaces that extrude from the roof. We don’t have any dormers, but I covet the look when I see it on other Capes. They might not do much in terms of added square footage, but dormers do add more natural light and create an extra nice aesthetic.
It’s the perfect size and layout for my small family.
Our little Cape would likely be described as a “starter home” in listings. It’s a term that I actually abhor for its bold assumption about who’s living under the roof. And while I don’t believe this will be our forever home — another term that I dislike, by the way — I can say that it’s the perfect size for me, my husband, and our Labrador Retriever mix.
Our home is currently a two-bedroom, but there’s room on the first floor to create a third bedroom. Between that and our second full bath — which is not always something you see with small Capes — we feel good about our prospects when it comes time to sell.
We’ve got cold winters here in New York, and though we usually don’t get nearly amount of snowfall that our neighbors farther north get, we have been covered in recent seasons. The snow looks rather pretty on our gabled roof, but it usually doesn’t stay there for very long — and that’s a good thing. Ye old New Englanders were onto something when they made those pitched roofs that make it rather difficult for ice dams to form after a snowfall.
There is one caveat: Storms can be fierce in the Northeast, but when you’re on the second floor of a Cape Cod-style home, it sounds like the world is ending. I learned this the hard way during one particularly terrifying thunderstorm. It turns out that when your roof is that much closer to your head, even the soft pitter-patter of rainfall sounds like imminent disaster.
The Cons of Living in a Cape
To be clear, I am grateful for our lovely home. But as a home and real estate writer, I’m not above focusing my critical eye at my own abode. Here are a few things I would share with house hunters looking at Capes.
The second floor is really half a floor.
Cape Cod homes are often billed as one and half stories, and for good reason — our second floor does not have nearly the same amount of square footage as the first floor. Upstairs, we’ve got two large bedrooms connected by a very short hallway leading past our bathroom.
Then, there’s the fact that the bedrooms have sloped ceilings on either side of the room, thanks to our pitched roof. We’ve set up our furniture just right, but I’ll admit to you, dear reader, that I have bumped my head on the ceiling more times than I can count while cleaning or making the bed.
The second floor gets hot in the summer.
As I write this, we’ve gotten a bit of a break in hot weather this summer — but it’s been a doozy with an air conditioning bill to prove it.
“Cape Cod-style houses situated in warmer climates are difficult to cool during summer as the heat in the attic makes the upper story hot,” says Alex Capozzolo, co-founder of Brotherly Love Real Estate, a home buying company in Philadelphia.
We don’t have an attic, but we have found our second floor to be quite stifling when the mercury is on the rise. We’ve found it also gets pretty cold during the winter, but I’d much rather deal with adding a heavier comforter to our bed than keeping the heat on full blast.
Colberg says that a Cape’s small and simple floor plan makes it a good jumping-off point for expanding — but there are certain ways to do it if a homeowner wants to keep the distinct Cape style intact.
A renovation plan that would maintain the Cape exterior requires the addition of front dormers in the front or “bump-outs.” which are usually in the rear of the home. (There are Capes with bump-outs in the front, though this does alter the look of the home greatly). Our home’s bump-out is indeed in the rear of the second floor — it was added to create the second bathroom at some point after the original construction of the home. We’re glad the previous owner did that work for us, because having a second full bathroom in a small home can only help us out at resale.
A Home That’s Built to Last
Since we don’t really need more room, my husband and I are content with making minor interior improvements over time. We are aware that when we sell this house, there is an excellent chance the new owner will do a roof raise and transform our cute little house into something completely different, like a center-hall Colonial. Now that’s another lovely style to be sure, but it’s not a Cape.
I can’t control what the next owner will have in store for our little Cape, but I’d much rather focus on enjoying our home. This might not be our forever home, but it’s a good feeling to know that it can be. “A well-designed Cape Cod-style home can last the average American family for a lifetime,” Capozzolo says.
Noella is the assistant editor for Apartment Therapy’s News and Culture section. You can find her words in Scalawag Magazine, Healthline, them, Uproxx, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue. In her free time, she enjoys roller skating and listening to Solange.
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Name:Emanuel de Sousa Location: Porto, Portugal Size: 1470 square feet Type of Home: Apartment Terrace Years Lived In: 2 years, owned
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Emanuel de Sousa actually found this apartment by chance. An architect by trade, he’s worked on a variety of projects, from a luxury townhouse building to a concept store and art gallery, so he was well-prepared for the challenge of renovating his own home. When his sister spotted the place, de Sousa says it was rundown and abandoned, but he was leaving his rental of four years at the time, “so it was almost serendipity,” he says, “to be able to continue in the same neighborhood” while refurbishing this home.
The best parts about this apartment? De Sousa loves being in the center of the city, as well as having a terrace, the morning light from his bedroom, the sunsets in the summer “when afternoon rays of light enter through the terrace and gets refracted by the kitchen mirror, flooding the living room with rainbows,” just to name a few. He spends a good deal of time relaxing in his Eames chair, reading and listening to music, or working on architecture and art pieces. He particularly loves the blend of Porto backyards, city center liveliness, and “‘pinheiro manso’ (stone pine or umbrella pine), a favorite tree of mine, which is very traditional in the forest near the Atlantic sea in Portugal.” In sum, “in summer, with the windows open listening to the birds, it is perfect.”
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Inspiration: Anything and everything around me, my daily life, my travels. Everything becomes “material” to work with or around.
Favorite Element: My favorite is surely the most complicated to get together as well, and possibly also the biggest indulgence. It was the adaptation of a standard counterweight sash window to become the partition of the kitchen and living room, which in the end works as an open kitchen or counter. But from the complication of adapting the window framework into this new function, a sort of curiosity cabinet was born, an homage to the glass display storage (common in Portuguese family homes). These display cases truly enchanted me as a child, and later as an architect, opened up a deep enjoyment and admiration for these cabinets. They were actually originally an entire room rather than a piece of furniture, and here, it really does it all. It’s almost a space in and of itself — it displays everyday life objects along with unique pieces, a collection of my notable objects, which I’m always rearranging, enlarging, expanding.
Biggest Challenge: This three-bedroom, ’60s modernist apartment was readapted in the ’90s for a kindergarten, and oddly enough, they didn’t demolish any walls to make the spaces large enough for classrooms, but they did install two large beams (which you see in the living rooms and bedrooms). Although they are actually obsolete, they became the “trigger” for the entire renovation. Now it’s a two-bedroom home, but the spaces are more generous, more contemporary, and up-to-date with our present daily needs.
Proudest DIY: It wasn’t an actual DIY on my part, but the stainless steel cabinetry in the terrace was put together by reusing an industrial kitchen counter that was dismantled and was almost trashed in another design project I had at the time of this refurbishment.
Biggest Indulgence: Looking at the overall budget, these are the most biggest indulgences in a quite tight budget:
— The Douglas solid plank wooden flooring of extraordinary dimensions, some of the planks were 5m long (and a nightmare to deliver and unload), by the Danish DINESEN. These were an extravagant purchase, but definitely worthwhile and wonderful to walk barefoot on.
— The minimal window frames were definitely quite an adventure, and the large panes were actually brought in aerially with the help of a work site close by at the time. But the end result is brilliant, you almost don’t see the frames, as they are less than 2cm, so it’s almost as if there are no windows separating inside and outside. In the summer, the sliding windows and doors almost disappear, and you get this amazing fluidity between living room and terrace, indoor and outdoor.
Is there something unique about your home or the way you use it? The second bedroom turned out to be the home gym and the guest room, and the odd beams in the end became the perfect imbedded architectural solution for a sort of contemporary workout, from yoga to low pressure fitness to a basic level of calisthenics.
What are your favorite products you have bought for your home and why? I guess it’s always the latest thing we buy, and for now, it’s the Beni Ourain Rug that just arrived directly from Marrakech. It’s a handmade, 100 percent virgin wool, milky-colored rug with entrancing diamond shapes.
Please describe any helpful, inspiring, brilliant, or just plain useful small space maximizing and/or organizing tips you have: All my design and interior projects are based on a basic concept, the “working wall,” which means I tend to convert any given wall or partition into hidden cabinetry. In domestic projects, either small or large, the issue tends to be always about storage, as individuals — no matter what — tend to collect things over time. Giving the wall a function besides dividing space is always a win-win, even if you seem to be “losing” space.
Finally, what’s your absolute best home secret or decorating advice? Never forget mirrors, especially large ones, like floor-to-ceiling, as they work wonders, either in small or large spaces, from creating an illusion of more space to refracting natural light. I tend to use lots to mirrors, either as one more architectural material or as a piece of decor.
Inspired by the powerful family ties of the clients and their connection to the environment, the Totoro House concept erases boundaries between living spaces and the garden. Designed by CplusC Architectural Workshop, this design was named after Studio Ghibli’s animated fantasy, My Neighbor Totoro, which explored the importance of such relationships more than three decades ago. To keep these bonds unbroken, the lounge, kitchen, and dining space are merged into one family zone that melts out into the garden. The outdoor space acts as an extension of the living room, including its own cooking area and seating, so that family life can flow freely and contentedly.
The exterior of this unique home design has a distinct space age appeal, synonymous with the futuristic thinking of late 1950’s architecture. An overhanging roof sweeps around the side of the house with a widely curved corner before soaring into the sky as a great angular projection.
The aerodynamic-like roof design shades a single-story build with interesting fenestration. Clerestory windows cut around the full perimeter, crowning walls of glass bifold doors and round feature windows.
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At night, the effect is dramatised under warm glowing lights from inside and outside of the home.
The original house on this plot suffered disconnection with the rear garden because of the topography. A new extension was added to bridge the gap that hindered the homeowners, creating an easier transition to the outdoors via a fresh living space. Small patios were added to extend the usable area, like this shady spot with outdoor lounge chairs.
The new outdoor spaces were arranged with the privacy of both the homeowners and their neighbours in mind, ensuring all could continue to enjoy the environment in peace and seclusion with their families.
The roof overhang blurs the margin between indoor and outdoor living spaces, making exterior areas into partially roofed rooms.
The new home extension features a large round window that accepts a wonderfully framed view of the landscape into the living room.
The circular motif is repeated on the face of the building and in a second window behind the outdoor dining room. To achieve the decorative brass cladding with environmentally conscious practice in mind, careful calculations were made in order to cut from only two standardised sheets.
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From the exterior, the round window designs are a porthole into the family’s close-knit lifestyle.
The threshold between the architecture and the garden was buffered with the help of a landscape designer. Native plants make soft borders around the patio and climbing plants are intended to lushly envelop the master bedroom facade over time.
Alongside the outdoor dining set, a high-end barbeque stands ready for a cookout underneath a shady pergola.
The new home layout has transformed the formerly gloomy living areas into a single light-filled open-plan space. This free-flowing concept granted the homeowners’ wish to be more united with their children.
The round window concept that frames the garden view was motivated by the traditional Japanese concept of Shakkei. Shakkei is the principle of including background landscape into the composition of a garden, or “borrowed scenery”. In this instance, the large porthole delivers a scene of tranquillity during the school day and a snapshot of fun family activities on evenings and weekends.
The curves of a wingback chair complements the circular window design.
With the glass doors at each side of the room retracted, there is a blissful through-breeze all day, as well as the fresh scents and calming sounds of nature.
The lounge furniture rests on a welcoming white living room rug, providing plush comfort from the hard, tiled living room floor.
The kitchen is visually separated from the lounge by a change in floor height, which allows the parents to oversee their children playing whilst they cook dinner.
Indoor plants are situated along the sills of clerestory windows to strengthen the link with the garden.
Steps climb the circular kitchen diner setting on both sides, facilitating easy movement around the main living space for multiple family members undertaking different tasks.
Fluted panels add modern texture to the wooden kitchen design.
In the bedroom, part of the round window was made operable to permit natural ventilation. The curved frame serves as a fun window seat for the children.
Two layers of blinds provide control over the level of light and privacy.
In the master bedroom, a pocket door slides away to reveal an ensuite shower space design.
Moving from the shower area, we come to a unique bathroom sink beneath a frameless vanity mirror. The walls of the ensuite bathroom are clad with vertical subway tiles, which makes the room appear taller.
All the original areas of the home have been upgraded to fit with the new extension, including the modern landscape design.
The new spaces have improved family life and fun.
Careful consideration has been given to the use of materials in the design of Totoro House, with many existing materials reused and repurposed to reduce waste.
This design ethos coincides with the sustainable lifestyle of the family.
Daily environmental impact has also been reduced by including an 8000L rainwater tank.
A 3kW photovoltaic system was also installed to power the home with solar.
The solar store powers exterior lights long into the night.
On the floor plan, we can see the relationship between the private bedroom quarters of the original house, the new open-plan living room extension, and the garden.
Here is an atypical house tour that does not use music to prop up the visuals, instead it embraces the natural sounds in the house’s setting.
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