Our work speaks for itself.

WHARF HOUSE, PROVINCETOWN, MA

1911. Art school, then restaurant, then home.

The building at 463 Commercial Street has been a landmark on Provincetown Harbor since 1911. It started as Ambrose Webster's art school, an early hub of the Provincetown art colony. By mid-century it had become Pat Patrick's Flagship Bar and Grill, where a young Anthony Bourdain got his start in restaurant kitchens. When I was hired to rebuild it in 2012, the wharf and the structure both needed serious work, and the project had to satisfy Provincetown's historic codes and Massachusetts state waterfront codes simultaneously.

The brief was to convert the restaurant into a private residence without losing the building's soul. That meant preserving what mattered most. The wide plank floors. The porthole windows. The dory, which has been the bar since the Flagship era and still is. New systems and modern living, all sitting carefully behind the scenes. Marble island, brass faucet, a sculptural light over the kitchen, full water views from the harbor side. Outside, the original wooden pilings still hold the structure above the tideline, weathered green where the tide reaches.

In 2019 the house was featured in HGTV's Ultimate House Hunt in the waterfront homes category and covered by Cape Cod Home magazine.

This is the project I'm proudest of. It's the closest thing I've done to architecture as a form of memory. The building has held a piece of Provincetown's working waterfront for more than a century. The job was making sure it could keep doing that as a home.