Building on the Water:
Rain That Comes In Sideways

Rain that comes in horizontally is an ordinary condition on the water, and the house has to be drawn for it from the first sheet, not corrected later. Cardello put it this way: “we have a very specific way of designing and documenting homes like this on the water as a firm that does a lot of waterfront.” The word that carries weight there is documenting. A waterfront house is a set of decisions written down in enough detail that the people building it do not have to guess.

Wind raises the stakes. In the conversation it was noted that a house like this will see sideways rain and hurricane winds, and the architect agreed: a curved roof, curved windows and a great deal of glass all have to be hurricane-proof as well as beautiful. Glass is what the client wants on the water, because the view is the point. It is also the part of the wall that is hardest to protect. Those two facts have to be solved together, by the architect and the builder, on paper, before anyone orders a window.

On the Darien house, the water decided the form. Cardello explained that the round tower is there because the sea wall wraps that corner of the house, and that corner gives a panoramic view of Long Island Sound. The tower is not a flourish. It follows the edge of the property, and the view follows from that.

He also described how little of this happens by choice alone. Darien has very restrictive height requirements, so he used an eyebrow dormer on the upper floor to bring the roofline where he wanted it. The project needed multiple variances and went to planning and zoning, which made it, in his words, a technical project from a town standpoint. In our experience that is the honest shape of waterfront work: the constraints come first, and good design is what you build from them.

Privacy is a real question on the water, because boats go by. Cardello described the answer as a drapery system that comes out and around the room at the push of a button, with all of it coordinated so it does not show in the photograph. This is the kind of detail that only works if it is planned early. A system that appears at the push of a button has to be thought through with the architect, the windows and the ceiling long before the room is finished.

Flood exposure is the other thing that is easy to miss before you own the land. Cardello noted that a property in a velocity flood zone means wave action on the house, and that builders and architects can often see that quickly when they look at a site. His advice was that a buyer is better served to learn it before going in deep.

Waterfront also takes longer to get started. For a coastal application, Cardello gave a generic design answer of about six months, and, once the house is drawn, designed, detailed and priced, about eight months to a year before the team is ready to dig. He noted the coastal application alone takes about three months to get through planning and zoning. None of that is wasted time. It is the cost of drawing a house that is meant to stay standing in a storm.

If you want to see how the cost of these decisions adds up, read What a Custom Home Costs, and Where the Money Goes. To see how we work with an architect from the first conversation, read How We Work, or look through our projects.