Boho Beach Shack in the Making…

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of working on a modern beach shack for our world traveling client and her vibrant, eclectic spirit. She wanted a summer home with vibrant textures, colors, and patterns that would remind her of places she has visited along the way, while maintaining an overall casual atmosphere suited for Martha’s Vineyard. We looked to evoke the essence of her global experiences – whether an elephant safari, an Alpine train ride, or collecting ikebana baskets in Japan – through our material and furnishing selections.

Bamboo Benefits

As natural disasters and political and economic instability have displaced millions of people globally in recent years, many are in urgent need of feasible and eco-friendly design solutions for temporary housing. I traveled to Colombia for the purpose of training in traditional bamboo construction and to gain a better understanding of assembly systems that might be practical, reproducible, and adaptable anywhere in the world.

Thanksgiving, Cramer style…

As the weather turns toward winter, checking the outdoor thermometer takes priority upon waking in preparation for adding more layers, and my anticipation of Thanksgiving grows quickly! After all,  it is my favorite holiday – sure, the the travel can be a nightmare but once we get past that and settle into our destination, the warmth of this holiday so rich with meaning takes over.

Clambake!

The Clambake, a spectacular American culinary event specific to our region, originated on the coast of southeastern Massachusetts. The Wampanoag Indians, from Narragansett Bay to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket are said to have passed the tradition on for generations. For centuries before modern development shell mounds, or “middens,” towering over men,  were excavated along shorelines; the middens pinpoint exact locations of these ancient feasts. One such location is at the head of the Westport River in southeastern Massachusetts, or the “Head of Westport.” Westport, my home town, is a fishing and farming town steeped in local tradition and pride. So, naturally, my friends and I have adopted the clambake tradition from generations of our families before us. This year was our 11^th annual clambake hosted for 150+ of our closest family and friends.

The bake starts a week before the big day; ordering food, collecting friends to help, gathering pallets for burning, and digging up equipment for serving, display and ambiance. The site of the clambake shifts from various friends’ (or parents’) back yards. The bake is always in an open field off in the woods, a perfect spot for camping and debauchery. The night before, out-of-towners converge at one of our homes and we prep and cook the stuffed quahogs. Early the morning of the bake, we build a bonfire over a bed of round, cannonball- like stones. As the fire heats up, our chowder starts to cook and the crew heads to the river to collect rock weed. With a truck bed full of rock weed, we head back to the bake site for set up, all the while stoking the fire. Parents and kids trickle in all afternoon, and at 4:00 we prep to face the coals, dressing up in our fireman jackets, handkerchiefs, gardening gloves and boots.

Falling for the Fly

I’ve been fishing pretty much since I could walk. My dad is a talented angler and he started taking me when I was a toddler. Growing up in Vermont, we caught a lot of freshwater fish. It was always something we could do together, a bond and connection that was strengthened on family vacations to Cape Cod, where we spent hours wading the sandy flats stalking striped bass, the Cape’s crown jewel of inshore sport fishing.

Hillside Haven

Article in New England Home Magazine.

www.nehomemag.com

Bid for the Bookmatch Bench….

We made a chair! Our team worked with Jeff Soderbergh and the folks at JS Studio to create a one-of-a-kind furniture piece that will be auctioned on June 1, 2017

Book Learning

An interview with Mark Hutker in Residential Design magazine.

A new perspective…

As a board member for Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod (HHCC), I have witnessed, firsthand, the impact of creating home ownership opportunities for working class families in our community. Several weeks ago, I traveled to the village of San Juan de la Maguana, in the Dominican Republic, for a house build with a group of other HHCC volunteers.

We worked with construction techniques that were very different from anything I had worked on or designed before. The first house was made of pre-cast concrete panels and a corrugated metal roof. We poured concrete into molds, which were laid out to bake in the sun, and then stacked dried panels within vertical aluminum channels to create walls. The structural integrity seemed suspect to me until all of the panels were erected, and I saw how simply and strongly they supported each other. Once the walls were in place, we parged seams and imperfections, and then painted them inside and out. This work was done in three days, leaving only the roof and wiring, all of which would be completed in about a week.

An interview with Skolos & Wedell

Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell work to diminish the boundaries between graphic design and photography—creating collaged three-dimensional images influenced by modern painting, technology and architecture. They recently spoke about the poster they created for the Lyceum Fellowship, an architectural competition for students co-founded by Mark Hutker.

Listen here: http://dissection.jkdesign.com/skoloswedell/

The Making of Penn Field

“Little League baseball is a very good thing, because it keeps the parents off the streets.”- Yogi Berra

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I played competitive baseball until I was twenty years old. After that, I have coached high school and/or youth baseball for another twenty years. I have always appreciated what appears, to me, to be the most precise of all competitive team sports. I also happen to love the fact that baseball has been played for over 150 years on a “diamond,” with a raised “pitching mound” in its center and the opposing chalk lined “batter’s box”.  There are bases, foul poles (inexplicably titled) and foul lines, on deck circles, coaches’ boxes, dugouts, bullpens and a warning track – all of which add to this outdoor theater.

In his 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” Ray Kinsella painted a tactile picture of how a baseball field, of all things, could be socially intriguing.  The whispered line “If you build it, he (they) will come” has been the inspirational root for innumerable baseball fields ever since.

Fast forward: In 2008, the Martha’s Vineyard Little League program was hoping to create similar intrigue by converting not a corn field, but an old car dump into a meeting place for learning and playing the game of baseball, while families and friends could comfortably gather and cheer the kids on. The premise was worthy, the task in doing so was far more complicated…

At first glance, the property looked perfect…flat, open and big enough to build the dream. Upon closer inspection, even after removing decades’ worth of automobiles, the land itself was littered with glass and metal debris, invasive roots, and compacted sand that would prove to be a drainage nightmare. Additionally, there was no legal road access or utilities, no topsoil and very little money. With such impediments, the project floundered for the following three years. By 2012, much of the initial $200K in Community Preservation Fund dollars allotted for the field had been absorbed by clean-up efforts, and the entire project was on the brink of stagnation. I was asked by a dwindling group of volunteers/coaches if I would design a field complex in hopes that the design drawings would suggest some positive momentum for the project, as well as help garner additional financial support and/or in-kind work.

Now Trending

Mark Hutker talks trends in residential design for the Winter issue of ArchitectureBoston magazine. Read it online here:

http://www.architects.org/architectureboston/articles/now-trending