Winning a Bulfinch Award, given annually for architecture, is a rare honor. Established by the New England Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, the prestigious award is named for Charles Bulfinch, our country’s first native-born architect and the designer of the Massachusetts State House. In the 2012 round of honors, architect Patrick Ahearn, AIA, scooped up not one, but two of the prizes. The awards seem tailor-made for Ahearn, who lives and breathes the precept that historically inspired architecture is one of our region’s most beautiful, and critically important, features.

“The architecture of this community is historically based,” Ahearn says of our region. “When I introduce new architecture to a history-rich region, it’s with scale and appropriateness of design.” Ahearn’s offices, located on Martha’s Vineyard and in Boston’s Back Bay, place the longstanding architect in the epicenter of classical architecture.

The Bulfinch Award that Ahearn won for new residential construction (over 5,000 square feet) was for Plantingfield Way, a charming house just outside of Edgartown village on Martha’s Vineyard. (He also won a 2012 Merit Award in the Commercial Category for The Boathouse, a private club in Edgartown that opened in 2008.) The Plantingfield Way home, designed in gambrel shingle style, overlooks Eel Pond and the harbor behind. The symmetry of the house, Ahearn says, “celebrates the long views to the water.” The interior has a similar relationship to the ocean. “The primary living spaces also take advantage of the long views to the water,” Ahearn says. The primary access to the property is through a newly created courtyard, with a pedestrian entry and carriage house wing.

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About Mary Grauerholz

Mary Grauerholz is the communications manager of the Cape Cod Foundation and a freelance writer.

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