Review
We make sense of our lives by the stories we tell ourselves about those lives. And no place is the curator of those stories like a home. It needn’t be an ancestral house or the place where we raise our families. It might be the cottage we visit only in summer. Or a chalet in the mountains. Or a city condominium. Or even the dream home still in the dream stage. Talk to Patrick Ahearn long enough about architecture, and that’s what you take away: Houses are the frames around our lives. We build them to shelter the spiritual as much as the physical. -- John Budris, Vineyard Style Review
That book, Timeless: Classic American Architecture for Contemporary Living (Oro Editions), showcases how Ahearn has expertly ascribed the greater-good theory to his work. Released last December, “Timeless” features 18 homes designed by Ahearn along with the stories behind their design, as told by Ahearn. The homes―a mix of historic restorations and new construction―are divided into six categories: History Preserved, History Enhanced, History Modernized, History Imagined, History Re-Interpreted, and On The Water. Ahearn and his team put together the 316-page collection in under a year, a challenging feat in itself before taking into consideration Ahearn had four decades worth of work to choose from. -- HALEY COTE, Cape Cod Homes Review
With an eye attuned to design from childhood, architect Patrick Ahearn was strongly influenced by his home town of Levittown, New York. The houses and streets of America's first planned community were thoughtfully designed and laid out in a perfect balance of density and scale. When Ahearn writes, in the forward of his new book, that his career has been shaped by two core beliefs―"that design―good design―has the power to improve people's lives, and that learning from the past is crucial to creating the future"―he can trace the origins of that first conviction to his boyhood in Levittown. Ahearn has spent his long career putting those principles into practice here in New England. The two-dozen projects featured in Timeless stand as beautiful evidence of his positive impact on our architectural landscape.
Mr. Ahearn’s new book Timeless (subtitled Classic American Architec¬ture for Contemporary Living), is a lush tome with hundreds of pictures of Edgartown homes. He says his intention was to pass along some of the lessons learned. “I’m 67 years old, I’ve been doing this for 44 years,” he says. “I really felt that my message about how I practice is important, not just for my clients, but even for other architects and other architects to be. I wanted to create a kind of primary about how you work in scale, and how the spaces between the buildings become important, and still be able to accommodate a client’s program, but also teach them about the public good theory, teach them about the context in which you work.” -- STEVE MYRICK, Vineyard Gazette Review
Downtown Edgartown demonstrates the architect’s “Greater Good Theory,” which “enhances the quality of life for the overall community while respecting the local character, scale, and imagery”―clearly a tactic with roots in those long ago potato fields. Ahearn’s newly released Timeless: Classic American Architecture for Contemporary Living showcases 18 projects that demonstrate his idea that design has the power to improve lives and enhance happiness. -- KILEY JACQUES, Period Homes Review
Ahearn’s story is told in a new book, Timeless: Classic American Architecture for Contemporary Living, written with Andrew Sessa. It begins when Ahearn, then a recent graduate of architecture school at Syracuse University, went to work for Benjamin Thompson & Associates, the firm responsible for turning Boston‘s Faneuil Hall into a marketplace. In 1978, he started his own practice (with an office in Faneuil Hall), and by the late 1980s he had renovated hundreds of buildings in Boston’s historic neighborhoods. But after visiting Martha’s Vineyard, the 90-square-mile island off Cape Cod, in 1989, he found his calling. -- FRED A. BERNSTEIN, Architectural Digest
If you’ve ever spent time in Edgartown, Massachusetts ― the exclusive Martha’s Vineyard enclave known for its 18th- and 19th-century Federal and Greek Revival architecture ― you’ve likely seen the work of Patrick Ahearn. But you probably had no idea that he, or any other present-day architect, had a role in shaping what you viewed there. And as far as Ahearn is concerned, that’s exactly the point. As he tells readers in his new book, Timeless (Oro Editions), which I had the pleasure to help him write, “If I have done my job correctly, I will be like a ghost who visits in the night ― leaving no trace and most successful when no one sees my hand.” -- Andrew Sessa
Gold winner in Art & Photography category of the The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) 2019 Benjamin Franklin Award™ program
About the Author
Celebrated as one of America’s top classical architects, Patrick Ahearn―a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects―began his career with ambitious adaptive-reuse public projects, and for the past 25 years has focused primarily on historically motivated, site-sensitive private residences in New England. Raised in Levittown, New York, and based in Boston for the past four decades, he received degrees in architecture and urban design from Syracuse University. Today, he oversees a firm of 12 designers working in studios in Boston’s Back Bay and in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard.
