A unique family home garners two BRICC Awards—one for the spectacular kitchen and one for an incredible outdoor space.

From the road, you would never guess that Chasing Lo Tyde—a shingle-style home with architecture, landscape architecture and construction by Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders (PSD)—was built upon a naval airfield. Located on the water,  the home occupies a remarkable setting. Its front facade looks like a classic summer cottage that might have stood here since the Gilded Age. “The traditional front plays tricks with scale,” says Sharon DaSilva, PSD Senior Designer. The shingles are Alaskan yellow cedar, which is a larger shingle than the typical white cedar shingles. The spacing of the shingle courses is eight inches instead of the typical five inches. The windows are large and have wider muntins. “The combination of these two factors tends to cause people to perceive the house as smaller than it actually is… more like a cottage.” The shutters seem to burst open like blue flower petals, while the entryway’s quartet of squat columns suggests a certain grandeur the pale golden, yellow cedar, shingles emphasize further. Robust plantings, boxwood and hydrangea beds, and the manicured lawn also seem to root the home in history. But less than a decade ago, this site was an overgrown tangle of weeds with a dilapidated ranch house sitting on it. And prior to that, it was a WWI-era outpost constructed to defend the coast from German U-Boats.

In 1917, the U.S. government commissioned a naval air station in Chatham to patrol the Atlantic during World War I. It housed 600 enlisted men, but its most distinctive feature was a dirigible hangar with massive concrete foundations to anchor the blimps. The base also had the distinction of providing defense against the only attack on US soil during that war—in the Battle of Nauset, which began when a German sub began shelling a tugboat and other vessels off Orleans. Both the battle and base proved short-lived, however, and the Navy shut it down in 1922. 

While PSD had general knowledge of the site’s past, nothing about the 1950s-era ranch that they had to remove for Chasing Lo Tyde suggested that parts of the airfield remained. It soon became obvious, however, as the firm’s Senior Landscape Architect Rob Calderaro explains. “We found enormous slabs of concrete,” he says. “And then we realized that they had been used as tie-downs for the blimps. They were buried in the ground, half of them four-feet thick. So removing these big pieces and making sure that the ground would drain—that was a bit of a challenge.”

In some scenarios, one could imagine turning the multi-ton anchors into some kind of sculpture, but while Chasing Lo Tyde would not make direct use of them as found art, it borrowed the theme of tethering something to the land. In the clients’ case, this element was family, and to solidify matters, they named their new home as a play on the names of their children. With family driving the narrative, the kitchen became a center of gravity. Blue factors prominently throughout the home, from the shutters to choices of art, wallpaper, and upholstery by interior design firm, Carolyn Thayer Interiors.  “The goal was to create a unified aesthetic that extends from the interior selections to the surrounding landscape,” says Carolyn Thayer.

Working in partnership with PSD and Carolyn Thayer Interiors, Classic Kitchens & Interiors (CKI) led the kitchen design for which they earned a Silver BRICC Award. CKI Design Manager Barbara Darcy says, “The clients are a young family, and they wanted to draw the Cape feeling into the house with some playfulness and were open to unique details. So it was fun working with them and Carolyn Thayer Interiors.” The choice to go with some of the millwork in a dark, nautical blue was daring but also served a purpose. The deep color helps to absorb some of the sunlight flooding in and balances out the white perimeter cabinetry. “It can look super dark, or light and energetic, depending on direct lighting, which is kind of like the ocean,” says Darcy. “They were drawn to it because it’s a navy paint with a charcoal-brushed glaze on top of it. They just fell in love with that when they saw the sample. The glaze, while deepening the effect of the base color, is hand-applied and offers a softer texture over a plain opaque. They never veered away from it.” 

Brass carries throughout the kitchen and pantry like sunbeams, and the perimeter kitchen cabinets are Nordic white, so the navy really pops. PSD carefully orchestrated the flow of this essential family space—and the house as a whole—to support the easy movement of activity between indoor and outdoor living spaces. CKI built upon this framework with a focus on the kitchen’s functionality. After all, Chasing Lo Tyde is a home the clients hoped would maximize their connection to the view and the land. Darcy explains, “Once the clients determined their appliance package, we began taking their routines into consideration— ‘Which part of the home will you come in with your groceries? Where do you come in from the pool?’ So, we situated a beverage drawer at the end of the island facing where the pool area was. Kids and guests can grab their own drinks without coming into the main workspace of the kitchen. We also determined that the sink should be located in the island facing out to the view. Having these conversations, led us to organize the rest of the kitchen to best serve their family and guests.” 

Helping define the kitchen at Chasing Lo Tyde is a circular window, like a ship’s porthole, and the pantry, which also serves as a kind of staging area for parties and for outdoor living. “The porthole window, while a nautical reference, also serves the functional purpose of keeping an eye out to the pool area while inside,” says DaSilva. With the latter, Darcy notes, “Our goal for the pantry was to have it be a beautiful extension of the kitchen while offering a secondary storage and serving zone.” The pantry carries the kitchen theme outward. “We made the decision to have the entire pantry in that dark moodiness, which was exciting because people can get nervous using a lot of color,” she says. “The clients knew that they wanted to have a sink in there. There’s also a microwave drawer, and the opposite wall is all full height cabinetry. It looks clean and classic while providing ample storage.”

The industry took notice of CKI’s work, as the Homebuilders & Remodelers Association Of Cape Cod presented them with a 2025 BRICC Silver Award for Best New Construction: Kitchen. One reason for this success is the way that the kitchen supports the outdoor spaces. So it’s fitting that PSD also picked up an award for the landscape architecture: the 2025 BRICC Silver Award for Excellence in Outdoor Living Space. This property has also been recognized previously. In 2024, another organization honored the project with distinctions for Best Single Family Home and Best Landscape Design. Key to the overall success is the holistic approach that PSD brings to all their projects.

Calderaro says, “We’re fortunate that we’re a one-stop shop for high-end residences on Cape Cod. One thing we do from a landscape design point of view is to look at a property and realize that when you’re on the water here, inevitably there will be some element that you’re dealing with: either the hot sun or the wind, or the bugs, or what have you. So the goal is to establish as many outdoor spaces or rooms that can maximize the best of the location while allowing a break when needed.”

From the start, PSD worked on the architectural design of the home and to site these different outdoor spaces. “The connection between the interior and the exterior was very important and the subject of much discussion during the design phase of the home,” says DaSilva. “The house has two very different characters. The first is what you see upon arrival, a nod to traditional summer cottages. The second is the way the house opens up to the view. All the major spaces have expansive water views, including the bedrooms (with the exception of the bunk room, which has only a peak of a view, but gets a dramatic cathedral ceiling to make up for it).”

They worked with conservation restrictions and permitting, then decided where to place the 20′ × 40′ swimming pool, the outdoor fire pit, and, Calderaro says, “The elaborate outdoor kitchen with everything from a double-tap kegerator and bar to grill, side burners, and sink.” Access to the best views would guide the process. He explains, “We want to take advantage of those spaces. And we didn’t want to put a pool right in the primary view from the house. So instead, we created a space for the pool that unified the main house and the garage/guest house.” By this logic, they were able to put this off to the side and to position the fire pit as the front row from which to watch the seascape. And it provided further advantages, Calderaro says, “It gave us the ability to say, if it’s windy, you’ve got this nice tucked-in spot over here, you can hang out at the bar. Or if it’s a beautiful sunny day and you want to hang out at the pool, you’ve got this lounge area. If it’s nighttime with a small breeze, you can hang out at the fire pit. We tried to create as many experiential spaces as possible. And I think that’s really our goal—to provide as many opportunities as possible for our clients.”

A crucial benefit to working with PSD is their fully integrated architecture and construction approach. Calderaro explains, “There’s a lot of collaboration, and having everything in-house makes that process smoother. It’s so much easier just to walk over to someone’s office and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should move this door to the screen porch so that we can accommodate something here.’ It’s a really nice, seamless process.” And that process goes hand-in-hand with practical living. “In addition to designing and building the house, we handle the landscape architecture. We design the pool, we design the outdoor kitchen, we do all the planting design, we do all the hardscape design, all the grading,” he says. “Really everything outside the house. Decisions include, for instance, the location of an outdoor kitchen—we want it in close proximity to the indoor kitchen. You don’t want to have the client run around the entire house to get a serving utensil.” 

One of the goals of Chasing Lo Tyde was to maximize the family’s access to nature and the beauty of its location in a complete transformation of what stood here before. In the landscape design, PSD introduced elements such as bluestone and a large, granite diving rock that help tie the different outdoor rooms together thematically. But ultimately, landscaping is also a living art. “When we design our planting plans, we’re thinking about how the plants will fill in. That can be  a curse and a blessing given the landscape is a constantly evolving thing. It takes some time to develop into what the vision actually is, but when it gets there for the clients, it’s very gratifying.”  

Chris White is a frequent contributor to Cape Cod Life Publications.