A classic Cape goes modern over the Pamet River.

Architecture on Cape Cod is so distinctive that a type of house was named for it. Traditional Capes are known for their symmetry, steep roofs, central chimneys, and shutters; representing the importance of a sense of order the Puritans and other early colonists valued. Built and designed primarily to provide shelter, they were simple, made of wood, practical, easy to replicate. In time, they became quaint, New Englandy, iconic—and they’re everywhere. So when Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and fellow architects such as Marcel Breuer and Serge Chermayeff came to Wellfleet and Truro in the late 1940s and began building modern houses with bold geometric forms, flat roofs, and huge windows (for integrating with nature), and largely constructed from simple materials like MDF plywood and glass, they must have seemed entirely out of place, or even insane. Turns out, they were cutting edge before their time, and eventually, legendary. And they blazed a trail through the Outer Cape for subsequent generations to follow. 

This is the context for the makeover of one Truro home at the turn of the 2020s, a project that started before and continued through COVID. Pamet Bend, the family property of Sonia and Richard McArdle, began as a modest antique Cape with a collection of outbuildings, but from the moment they took ownership in 2011, Sonia knew that a rebuild was in the future. From age three, she grew up going to Truro every summer, in a house across the street from this one. “I passed this property going home my whole life,” she recalls. So when it came on the market, she and her husband swooped in. “The original...