The approach to the barrier Island from the north bridge over the inland waterway is an emphatic reminder that the quotidian life of the mainland is being left behind. Ficus trees arch completely over the approaches to the bridge, and the low draw bridge, itself a holdout against those higher spans now required by FDOT up and down the waterway, threatens to back up traffic at the whim of a boater.

The town has two main roads running north-south, like Palm Beach's Ocean Drive and County Road, but with a far less formal skein of lots and blocks between them. This house is at the end of a phalanx of old housed and ficus street trees.

The existing house was an unusual combination of a single shed roof Mediterranean Revival room comprising the entrance, which is to be saved and incorporated into the new house, and a larger two story u-shaped vernacular piece behind it that is to be removed.

The town, like many others, is faced with increasing pressure to build larger homes. Where coverage limits are insufficiently restrictive, their zoning appeals specifically to a strategy of designing larger houses as

a series of pavilions , emphasizing the importance of scale over size. Walls are not permitted to extend in a single plane for more than seventy feet, without a sustained offset. The height limit is twenty two feet to the highest eaves.

The basic configuration of the house derives from the convergence of several considerations at once; the requirement to save and incorporate the old entrance, the requirement to offset the wings, and the need to minimize the house's depth. The buildable footprint for this lot is wide but only sixty feet in depth.

The compositional pleasures of the house derive from a contrast between the regularity of the buildable footprint of the lot, and the picturesque impulse of the roofs. The house is studiously informal in massing. This helps in incorporating the existing shed roof piece. The main house is organized around an atrium, and to the degree that the low height limits allow for a silhouette at all, the house pinwheels off the tower at the southeast corner. One enters off the atrium, facing the guest house and pool garden. The pool court between the main house and guest house is square. The guest house presents its own spiral composition of elements from the main house entry hall.