As its name indicates, Beachside sits on the shore, facing the Long Island Sound that separates Connecticut and New York’s Long Island. The house happens to be just down the road from Red Barn, the small “outbuilding” with art studio and accommodation designed by Ferris and featured in Swisspearl Architecture #27. Ferris says the Swisspearl panels covering the walls and roof of that earlier building enabled him to create an abstraction of “the ultimate red barn.” If the client for Beachside was aware of Red Barn or not is unimportant, since the architect was inclined to take a similar approach to the newer house, aiming for an abstraction of New England vernacular architecture in the gable forms covered in light-coloured fibre cement panels. Instead of a bold architectural statement recalling the state’s agricultural vernacular, Beachside’s relatively subdued imagery and relaxed floor plan harken to the houses in Kelly’s book, or to a farmhouse that would have sat in proximity to a working barn. Beachside consists of four gable volumes with zinc roofs and shorter, flat-roofed glazed corridors linking them. The main approach to the house from the north leads to a two-story glass entry and glimpses of a thick interior wall with punched openings free of glass that correspond to the abstracted traditional windows set into the gable volumes.