December 2021

I was 7, maybe 8. My father had been saying he would bring me to work with him for a while. He worked a lot, 5 days a week, of course, Saturdays when work was available, and sometimes Sundays, when he was working on a roof or side project that was time and weather sensitive. I had gotten good at helping him unload his truck every day when he got home. He would load trash barrels with cutoffs of the wood stock to bring home, and we used this material to heat our home in the winter, supplemented by three or four chords of wood. This was our main source of heat. In the late 1980s, when I became proficient at unloading the barrels at home, I earned the opportunity to join his crew on a demo/rebuild.

Getting to ride in his truck to the jobsite was an adventure. We went through towns I hadn’t seen before and down roads that seemed too fancy for us to belong around; yet, when we arrived on the jobsite, it was a special place where a hulking mass of a frame for a new home was going up in Essex, Massachusetts, down on Conomo Point. This house was being built for Sally Harkness, and I was working for her son, Fred.

I tried to work diligently and with an effort level that would allow me to stay. The carpenters all seemed like rock stars or superheroes with larger-than-life personalities. There was Fred Stanton, a Native American man with a great attitude toward life and a gruff way of teaching things like how to install Tyvek, flash a window, and wrap air hoses at the end of the day. Lovell Parsons, a grandfatherly gentleman who had built and seen everything and had a kind way of quietly steering you in the right direction.

I learned so much from emptying trash barrels and gophering, getting tools from down in the trucks parked at the base of the hill where the house was being built. I learned about strapping, sill plates, top plates, headers, rake boards, and soffits, and I am grateful for all the lessons. This experience, those people, that house, all helped steer my career and life toward architecture and, specifically, toward visualizing homes in various styles and collaborating with the builders that will put them together.

SKA was voted Best Transitional Architect 2022 by Boston Home Magazine, and we are incredibly grateful for this acknowledgment. Building homes has been my life’s work and being acknowledged for our ability to design across a spectrum of styles is something I am incredibly proud of. This past year, we had three new team members join our studio, and we expanded our work in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. We look forward to continued growth in the year ahead, and we thank our clients, partners, and community for the amazing collaborations that have brought us to this point.