Belvedere Plains

Shingle-style custom home overlooking Falmouth Harbor and Vineyard Sound. The 2019 PRISM Silver for Best Living Room/Dining Area is a category that resists embellishment. Trade jurors are not recognizing a kitchen showroom or a brand identity. They are recognizing the quality of one principal living space. At Belvedere Plains, that space is an open-concept kitchen, dining, and living room that gives the household real room to move and the layout latitude to host.

The plan starts before the front door. A patio at the front of the house is positioned to catch the morning sun, turning a transitional zone into a daily room. From there the house opens into a single great-room sequence. Kitchen, dining, and living share air and light without pretending to be one furniture-store space; transitions are handled in plan rather than in décor. The architecture is shingle-style by intention, sized and detailed for a Cape Cod climate rather than for the magazine page.

Outside the principal space, a heated terrace extends the living room into a third-season room. It is a Cape Cod climate move that reclaims weeks of usable outdoor entertaining at the shoulders of summer. Above, a rooftop deck does the work the lot itself cannot quite do at grade. It lifts the house high enough to see Falmouth Harbor and Vineyard Sound; the view a coastal town owes a family that did not buy directly on the water.

The home was project-managed by Senior Project Manager Kristian Andrade, who took home a separate honor that same year: the 2019 PRISM Most Valuable Team Member award from the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Cape Cod. The two awards are the kind of pairing that tells a fuller story than either could on its own. A home reads right when the person running it reads right.

In the summer of 2019, Belvedere Plains was the subject of a full half-hour episode of Home, Life & Style on NESN. Host Parker Kelley toured the home with Andrade and the homeowners, walked through the landscape architect's work, cooked with a chef inside the great room, and closed the show with a Cape Cod clam bake on the property. It aired as the thirteenth and final installment of Season 1, the kind of feature producers can't plan for. They're looking for a home that works on camera as a real place where a real family lives. That assignment is harder than the photograph.

The deeper move at Belvedere Plains is restraint. The home does not call attention to itself. It establishes the right mood and makes daily life easy: a brief that sounds simple and is, in practice, the hardest one to write a check for.