Two new dormers, improved sightlines, and more windows open up a traditional Cape-style home, beckoning to a couple’s circle of family and friends. 

Maureen Arkle and her husband, Neil Fitzpatrick, interviewed several contractors before moving permanently from their home in Dover, Massachusetts, to their second home in Dennis. They had owned the Cape house for a number of years, using it mostly as a rental property, and now wanted to invest in some remodeling in order to make it just right for themselves. But all the firms said the only way to create a proper primary bedroom suite in the house on the Cape—one of their must-haves—was to combine the two bedrooms on the first floor, which faced a neighboring house. 

“We have almost three acres of property with no neighbors on any side except that one,” Arkle says. With all that potential for privacy, she wanted the primary suite to be sited elsewhere. She and Fitzpatrick finally settled on a company that said they would put their bedroom in another spot. And they did. The drawings came back with the couple’s sleeping quarters right next to the kitchen—and, again, facing that one house.

That’s when they went back to one of the residential firms they had talked with originally: McPhee Associates in East Dennis. “Rob [McPhee] was really this very down-to-earth, approachable kind of guy,” Arkle says. “There was no fluff, no pretense. He just spoke the way it was. We talked with him about the possibility of staying in our bedroom upstairs and turning it into something that worked for us. That’s when he introduced us to Kendra Seifert—McPhee’s in-house architectural designer. She did great plans for us and was a...