A Philistine in the Shingle Museum

Everyone on Nantucket is familiar with 105 Main Street: The home, also known as the Starbuck-Kilvert House, occupies a prominent spot by the Civil War monument just beyond Nantucket’s downtown, and for decades was a regular stop on tours sponsored by local charity and civic groups. It’s one of the remaining examples of Nantucket’s first generation of residences—constructed in a timber frame and featuring the sloped rear extension known as a lean-to—inspired by postmedieval English styles adapted to New England life. “The humble and dignified Starbuck house,” Rose Gonnella wrote in 2003’s Sea-Captains’ Houses and Rose-Covered Cottages, “is a perfect mirror of Nantucket’s sturdy...architecture.” Its front door provided the sole image on the cover of both that book and Building with Nantucket in Mind, a 184-page guide published in 1995 by the commission and given to builders as a suggestion of how to hew to ruling tastes on architectural styles.

The Starbuck house began its life in about 1690, erected by Edward Starbuck, one of Nantucket’s first non-native residents. In 1763, the house was moved from its original location to a plot of land along the “highway” in the new downtown abutting Nantucket’s harbor. Main Street evolved around the Starbuck house, which itself remained—seemingly unchanged—in the Starbuck family until Sarah C. Tobey, Edward Starbuck’s great-great-great-granddaughter, sold it off in 1923. The house then passed through a number of hands over the next decade, until Charles Kilvert moved in with his wife in 1937.

After Kilvert’s estate put 105 Main up for sale in 2000, outsiders began taking a closer look at the house and realized that defining its “historical character” might be more complicated than originally believed. The house was a pastiche, influenced by the early-20th-century movement known as Colonial Revival; in many cases, the elements were no older than Kilvert himself. The shingles were new, as were some of the windows: 12-over-12 window sashes that obviously did not date from the 17th century, and glass, clearly mass-produced, that could not have been more than two generations old. The plank door that had appeared so prominently on the commission’s how-to book was a modern replica. When Roggeveen toured the basement after the sale, he realized that the foundation that resembled stone rubble was actually stone-and-mortar veneer applied to concrete-block masonry. “That’s when I became aware of the extent of work that had been done,” he says. “The house had reflected various sensibilities in terms of style, which is historic in and of itself as a process in Nantucket. As a result, the house had an appearance that people expected a really old house would have. It fit that image.”

The house lingered on the market, and in 2003, the Nantucket Preservation Trust invited local designers to each outfit one of its rooms and held a party in the garden. The purpose of the show house was to prove “you could adapt a house to today’s lifestyle but still retain its historical character,” says Ken Beaugrand, a local real estate agent and member of the trust’s board. But when the property finally found a buyer in October 2004, it didn’t take long for its new owner to demonstrate that he wasn’t satisfied with the house as it was.

DeSeta was a retired Delaware developer who split his time between homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and Charleston, South Carolina, and was now looking to spend much of the year in Nantucket. For the architects and contractor who agreed to work with them, he and his wife seemed ideal clients. DeSeta talked about how much experience they’d had with old buildings, including the restored Pennsylvania farmhouse they operated as an inn. And Wanda was known to deliver homemade muffins to the downtown Nantucket offices of the firm BPC Architecture and the construction sites where the contractor, Thomas Walsh, was at work.

In November of 2004, DeSeta submitted his first piece of paperwork to the HDC for approval: He wanted to build a new guest cottage, and to do that he would demolish the dilapidated, hydrangea-clad structure that was currently being used as a garage. Even though the building dated from only the 1930s and was not architecturally distinctive, the commission pressured DeSeta to withdraw his request, and then subsequently rejected the architects’ proposals to add shed dormers and remove a window. Throughout the project, DeSeta showed pictures of his Palm Beach home to Walsh and the architects to give them a sense of his style, even though the aesthetic—which included marble tiling—didn’t seem to match that of a modest Nantucket home. “It was very sophisticated, not a pretentious house,” says BPC’s Joe Paul, who visited DeSeta in Palm Beach for a meeting. “It just wasn’t a historic house.”

DeSeta made clear that the primary goal in converting the garage into a livable space was to use it as a residence while renovating the main structure. Once that project wrapped, he took the architects inside. According to Paul, the DeSetas insisted they intended to keep the existing layout, but—citing an older relative who had trouble negotiating stairs—wanted to replace the staircase. In addition, he says, they talked about removing the fireplace and chimney, a central element around which the whole house revolved. “The only historical parts were the parts they wanted to alter,” says Paul. “Immediately, that was a red flag for us. They were going to start destroying the house from the inside and we didn’t want to be part of it.”

Paul and his partners Mark Cutone and Chris Belanger were concerned for both the integrity of the house and their professional reputations if they proceeded. “This is not one of those houses that’s going to slip under the radar,” Paul says. The architects brought in a local mason known for his sensitive work on historic properties to see if there were creative fixes to DeSeta’s needs, such as keeping the fireplace but converting it to gas or creating a separate staircase altogether that would not affect the original structure. When Paul and Cutone floated these ideas in a meeting at BPC’s offices along Steamboat Wharf, Paul says, the DeSetas showed no interest.

“What you want out of this house isn’t true to the existing nature of the house,” Paul said as he severed the firm’s relationship with the DeSetas, who were at this point visibly offended. “I think you bought the wrong house,” Cutone added, before the two parties parted.