Storied Homes

The Architecture of Patrick Ahearn

We make sense of our lives by the stories we tell ourselves about those lives. And no place is the curator of those stories like a home. It needn’t be an ancestral house or the place where we raise our families. It might be the cottage we visit only in summer. Or a chalet in the mountains. Or a city condominium. Or even the dream home still in the dream stage.

Talk to Patrick Ahearn long enough about architecture, and that’s what you take away: Houses are the frames around our lives.We build them to shelter the spiritual as much as the physical. “I’ve been designing houses for close to a half century now, and two very simple – obvious even – principles never change. A good house design will make the people who live in it happier. And the past provides the best lessons for today’s and tomorrow’s design,” Patrick told me on a raining summer afternoon in his Edgartown office. In so many words, he’s told it to me many times, in many ways.

Timeless was featured in Vineyard Style, Fall 2017 issue.

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