A Shore Thing Architect focuses on house designs related to water

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Nearly all of us can relate to the idea of a dream house. Some imagine it in the city. Others in the mountains. And then there are those who have the most magical dream of all: a house by the water. They are drawn by the play of the sun, the dazzle of the moon and the wash of a cool breeze over lakes, oceans, rivers and canals.

Most of us can’t afford such a house, but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming or from having a voyeur’s interest in what others have done with their waterside structures. We look at theirs and dream of ours.

Robert Knight, a sailor and architect in Blue Hill, knows that a house on the water is a treasure to those who live there but he also considers it “something of a public trust.”

“Just as building on a neighborhood street has its obligations, building a house on the water requires respect for the public space that surrounds it,” writes Knight in “A House on the Water: Inspiration for Living at the Water’s Edge,” his new – and first – book, which was released in September by The Taunton Press. Knight makes a case for his public trust prescription by outlining key design elements for houses on the water and, in more than 300 color photographs by Randy O’Rourke, showcases 23 houses – including two of his own designs by Knight Associates, architects in the Blue Hill area, and others by Roc Caivano of Bar Harbor, John Silverio of Lincolnville Center and Stephen G. Smith of Camden. These houses, plus others throughout the country, illustrate his ideals.

“This is for people who don’t have zillions of dollars but still want a nice house,” said Knight, of the storehouse of information in “A House on the Water.”

To explain the detailed attention an architect gives a house, Knight sometimes tells the story of a suit he once had made in Cambridge, England. It was a simple process, he thought at the time. Choose the cloth. Get measured. Go back in a few days and pick up the new togs.

Little did he know that, when it comes to customized clothing, there is more to a suit than meets the guy.

The tailor had questions. Did his customer want a single- or double-breasted jacket? What kind of buttons? And how many buttons on the coat sleeves: two or three? Should the buttonholes be functional or for style only? Cuffs or no cuffs on the pants? Ample or close fitting? A watch pocket? Shoulder padding?

The questions kept coming – and Knight knows now that it was a good model for the persistence an architect must have when trying to discover and meet clients’ needs.

Unlike Knight in the tailor shop, however, Adin and Heather Tooker, whose Brooksville home is featured in the new book, were prepared with questions and specifications about the dream house they imagined. They consulted a number of architects before realizing that Knight was the most likeable, they say, in terms of personality and design. Longtime residents of Connecticut, the couple spent many summers in Maine before Adin retired from a career in banking and insurance and began pursuing his own dream to build a house on the Maine coast. He wanted to enjoy the views and be where the light was perfect for his work as a furniture craftsman.

“Bob went just so far in listening to us and then said he had enough information, that if we gave him more it would just be confusing,” said Adin, who now lives year-round in the sun-filled, shingled house on a point near Penobscot Bay. “When he presented his vision of what we told him, we were satisfied. It was fantastic for the site. It looks great, as if it has been here a long time, especially when viewed from the water.”

Knight’s book focuses on architect-designed houses that have some relationship to water, whether a boathouse on Muskoka Lake in Ontario, a townhouse on a canal in Venice, Calif., a sod-roof cabin on a cliff overlooking the Olympia Mountains in Washington state, or a prefab, cedar-plank, lakeside cabin designed by the famed Witold Rybczynski. In accompanying essays, Knight explains the unique problems that each house raised and the innovative and practical solutions they spawned. As with a suit and its wearer, after all, architecture is about tailor-making a house.

As with other Taunton publications that spotlight human-scaled, comfortable, finely crafted structures, “A House on the Water” is informed by the expertise of successful architects, but the appeal is less to those in the industry than in what Taunton editor Peter Chapman calls the “cultural creatives.”

“They are the public-radio, college-educated, predominantly female, East and West Coast baby boomers,” said Chapman. “It’s not so much for people who are building but more for people who are dreaming to do it. The books are more for inspiration. But there’s certainly food for thought if you are thinking about building.”

For that very reason, books such as Knight’s often are shelved in the home design rather than architecture section at bookstores. They defy the stuffy, academic status that the field has often held in the estimation of many homebuilders. Architect and writer Sarah Susanka, who is considered the trailblazer and advocate in the genre, said coffee-table books on residential architecture are popular – her “The Not So Big House” sold 450,000, according to Chapman – because they describe more than just interior decor.

“What people are really interested in is how you make a good house, which has a huge influence on how we experience our lives,” said Susanka. “These books have helped give a visual vocabulary and have increased a verbal way for people to talk about building houses. Now they can replicate what they want and communicate it to builders and designers.”

In September, B.G. Thorpe, a Blue Hill resident who works in Knight’s office. held a book-launching party for her boss. Several of the guests were Knight’s clients and, during a toast, they cheered his talents.

“I live in a Bob Knight house and I’ve lived in it for 12 years and every day I say: Thank you, Bob!” called out Sharon Lendvai, who runs a film business in Washington, D.C. and lives in Brooklin. Later, she added that the wonder of her house is “how it holds. Every single element makes sense.”

Ann Rittenberg, a literary agent in New York, spoke of a letter she and her husband, Paul, wrote to Knight about a summer home they wanted to build on Caterpillar Hill near Deer Isle. Among other items on their wish list was a seemingly unrelated notion that they liked Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“We felt like if we gave him a profile, he would figure it out,” said Rittenberg. “He focused on the whole package: who we are, who he is and the site. When we walked in, I said to my husband: ‘Bob built the house we wanted even though we didn’t know what we wanted.'”

At the Blue Hill party, Knight told the story of a phone call he received from a Florida developer who had seen the book and bought six copies because he thought it was “the first book on architecture that made sense.”

People in the room chuckled, as if to acknowledge that there’s no love lost between developers and architects. But Knight, who is enjoying his new status as book writer, clearly elevated the man’s comment to the realm of compliment. Nevertheless, he expressed a related anxiety, which may have actually been more of a query: “I’m not sure how the profession will regard the book. It may be a little low brow for them.”

By profession he is likely to have meant the high-art architects, the avant-garde stylists who value form over function. In other words, the opposite of “A House on the Water.” According to architecture writer and critic Alan Hess, books such as Knight’s and Susanka’s play an important role in broadening the field of architecture.

“It is for architects and builders who are interested in the techniques and crafts of building, more than in the trends of theory or fashion,” Hess wrote in an e-mail. “There are many architects who are uninterested or tired by the constant focus on avant-garde design.”

A Knight design, generally speaking, has a contemporary look that is well within the New England vernacular rather than the avant-garde. His major influence was Charles Moore, a humanistic architect who would have appreciated the Astaire-Rogers mythology as a shaping element for a client’s house.

“I went to a high-end architecture school,” said Knight, referring to Yale University during the days when Moore was on the faculty there. “Charles Moore was an internationally known architect and a great teacher, but was anti-form. When I was moaning about the grading system, he told me that the guys running the architecture schools in the Northeast are pretty convinced that what we are doing now is not perfect but it’s getting better. He said he thought architecture today is a disaster. ‘So I am looking for you to show me a new way,’ he said. He really was interested. So I learned how to think about architecture. I learned how to trust my own design instincts. He didn’t give us a theoretically based framework. He trained us to look at design problems and how to solve them.”

After Yale, Knight moved to Great Wass Island with three classmates to build a “spaced-out” contemporary house. At the end of that summer, his classmates went back to the city and Knight stayed behind for a year to finish the house. He left a year later for California.

“When I left Maine in 1974, I had been away from here only a month and I knew I would end up here,” said Knight. “It was pulling me back. I’m simpatico with the landscape. I like the harsh winters. I like the boldness of the coast. But I also like the intimacy of the environment. And I’ve always felt I understood the architecture here. I grew up in farmland New Jersey but I didn’t understand the architecture there. It didn’t talk to me.”

Before he starting building his own life in Maine, he met Lucia del Sol and her two sons in California, where he was teaching. “I like to say I went there to make my fortune but Lucia says I went there to marry Joni Mitchell.” Instead he married Lucia and moved her and the boys to Blue Hill. In 1979, they had a son of their own.

By that time, Knight had a practice large enough to hire his first employee. By the mid-1980s, business was booming or, as the case may be, building.

“I got to do what I wanted to do,” said Knight. “There aren’t many people who can say that. A lot of architects who do houses want to be doing museums. I don’t. I hate the meetings. I hate the committees. I like the one-on-one you get when you build a house. And I like New England architecture, and I like the Maine stuff best because it’s the most real.”

He knows, too, that each house he builds as well as each house in his book is the stuff that dreams are made of, whether the life savings go into it or it’s bankrolled by riches.

“For all of these people,” said Knight, “this is their heart and soul house.”

Alicia Anstead is a Style Desk writer. She can be reached at aanstead@bangordailynews.net.