Designing for Generations, Not Just the Present

Some places are built to hold time rather than mark it. A summer house passed through a family for generations becomes exactly that: an anchor point where grandparents, parents, and children return to the same shoreline, the same rituals, the same unhurried rhythm of a long August afternoon. For one family on New Hampshire’s Squam Lake, that anchor has held for more than sixty-five years.

Originally built in 1960 by the in-laws of Sheldon Pennoyer, the house belongs to a distinct moment in American residential architecture: mid-century modernism interpreted through local materials and a vernacular restraint. Its long, linear form opens to the lake on one side and the White Mountains on the other, with north- and south-facing windows that pull daylight through the interior from morning to evening. Inside, the local pine lining the floors and walls has settled into the kind of patina that only decades of use can create.

Sheldon Pennoyer and Jasmine Pinto recently returned to the house Sheldon and his in-law’s family has known for three generations. The renovation reconfigured the kitchen for more workspace and storage, and added a new wing that gives the home’s aging grandparents a comfortable first-floor life. Everything else, the porches for reading, the terraces for cooking outdoors, the long view down the lake, remains exactly as it was.

The best multi-generational houses share a few things in common, and the Squam Lake house has all of them:

• Private bedrooms and bathrooms that offer independence

• Flexible spaces that can shift between office, guest room, or quiet sitting area

• Generous shared spaces, kitchens open to great rooms, where gathering happens naturally

• Storage built for the needs of several households at once

• Layouts that allow for separation without ever feeling separate
  

Sheldon’s two children, Pier and Chase, are grown now and return each summer with families of their own. As Chase put it, the house is about “honoring what came before, while creating something that reflects who we are today.” That instinct, to build onto a place rather than over it, is the quiet thread running through this project, and through the way SP Architects approaches any home with history. The goal was never to simply modernize the house. It was to listen, first, to what the house, and the family, still needed.