A Philistine in the Shingle Museum

Nearly a year and a half later, no one at the Historic District Commission has any idea what’s going on at 105 Main Street, beyond the white lights that bedecked it at Christmas and the American flag and bunting that occasionally appear outside. Mark Voigt speculates that the chimney is gone altogether from the interior—he points to a metal lip curled over the top of the stack that suggests it has been repurposed as a different sort of exhaust—and believes that when DeSeta rebuilt the walls, he did so with new lumber. (One person involved in construction says the frame, sacrilegiously, now includes steel, too.) Edward DeSeta declined to show the interior to Boston magazine, either, or answer any questions about the controversy, saying only that “it’s a beautiful house, we love it, and we’d rather be private with our home.”

This March, the commission withdrew its proposed change to the town’s home-rule laws that would have extended its control over a building’s entire historic structure, including interior elements such as chimneys and framing. And Roggeveen has come around to something approaching praise for DeSeta’s renovations to the home’s exterior, which, after all, were all done with the commission’s approval. “Ten years from now, when it’s really weathered, you won’t know the difference from outside. If it were a brand-new house, we’d all be singing his praises,” he said on a recent Tuesday in his office, as he waited for a HDC meeting to begin. Still, he has not given up on using the whole episode as a way to try to influence future remodelers. Once the commission has depleted its current stock of Building with Nantucket in Mind, it will print a new edition, with a cover that will likely not picture the door frame from 105 Main. “He put a lighted doorbell next to it,” says Roggeveen, “which I find cheesy.”