This bayfront home for all seasons
on Long Beach Island is a family's fortress.

By Peggy Ackermann

Photographs By Craig Terry

 

Billy, Avery, Dad, and Sarah watch Cecile and Mom kayak in the family's backyard bay. Inside, the gigantic kitchen in the base of the back turret includes an island counter.

It used to be easy to spot a New Jersey beach house - a little early bungalow here, some twisted driftwood there - but that was back when people summered at the shore in their second homes. Now the tide is turning, and beach towns have more year-round residents who want their homes built with the tenacity to endure storms while displaying genteel notions of what a seashore house should look like.

Enter the bayside residence of Bill and Ursula Hodgson, a three-year-old "neo-Victorian" home for all seasons that would fit just as nicely into any upscale neighborhood as it does in the Long Beach island borough of Surf City. In several shades of green and pink, the home's cedar-sided exterior evokes some of the best of Victorian architecture, with two spectacular copper-domed turrets, graceful hipped roofing reminiscent of a pagoda, and accent woodwork carved to resemble rounded fish scales. Add to that big, comfortable rooms - 10-foot, 4-inch walls on the ground floor and 8-foot, 4-inch walls on the second - with big, inviting furniture, a plethora of windows and four young children, and the result is a home that is outstanding (it was featured on the Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts' 1998 House Tour) without being standoffish.

"We took "painted lady" pictures (of San Francisco houses) out of the library, and we took pictures in Cape May," Mrs. Hodgson says. Her husband, a builder by profession, was his own home's builder by design. The Hodgsons pored over the photographs before handing their pile of ideas to Harvey Cedars architect Bill Tagland, who balanced the asymmetry and put it on pilings.

Not that one would ever know - Tagland complied with building codes in the most discreet way, designing a house that stands on hidden pilings driven 25 feet into the ground and standing at least eight feet above sea level. The pilings are surrounded by a smooth slab footing, with some extending four feet past that footing, and are supported by spikes as well as cement-filled collars. In addition, the outside walls are framed with 2-by-6-inch studs instead of the usual 2-by-4s to provide steadiness and better insulation.

"A lot of houses wind up shaking," Tagland says. "The higher you get above the ground on pilings, the more they tend to shake."

"This house," Hodgson adds, "doesn't move."

The family's not planning to move either. Hodgson is a Surf City native, and his wife has adopted the borough as her own. The couple chose house over garden, covering every allowable square foot of a 60-by-122 foot lot with their 3,500-square-foot home. But they made the most of the grounds they kept: Decks off the back of the house hold patio furniture and children's outdoor toys, while the front entrance beckons beyond a charming courtyard, set with ruddy pavers and potted flowering plants, and secreted from the street by a half wall.

The home's winding staircase, with 18 windows, invites sunlight to dance on its curved walls.

Inside, the sea's green colors are captured in all their moods throughout the house and break in the hallway of frothy white, which leads to a magnificent winding staircase that is the interior of the front, 24-foot-tall turret. With 18 windows - 16 of them beautifully bare of dressing - the wooden staircase and its tower offer spectacular views of daily life on Barnegat Bay.

"Some people say, 'We can't believe you wasted so much room on a stairwell'" Mrs. Hodgson says, laughing.

The pickled oak flooring continues onto the risers, which glide so easily up the elegant turret that one almost forgets to wonder at the smoothness of the curved white wall and how the baseboard molding was bent to the will of that wall.

"We literally tied it up and threw it into the bay and soaked it for four days. We lost a couple of pieces - I found them," Hodgson says, pointing south toward the area of the fortuitous discovery, "took off the seaweed, and used them."

"Such ingenuity is apparent throughout the house. A game room done in clubby red, green, and cream striped wallpaper above forest-green wainscoting makes use of space above the unheated double garage - an area in which the Hodgsons did not want to put one of their four bedrooms because it would be too chilly in winter. The children's rooms are tucked into a children's suite in the rear of the house. These bedrooms and a full bathroom (one of three; the house also has two half-baths) are built off of a sitting room, which seems all the more spacious for its cathedral ceiling and all the more endearing for its drum-designed pouf. Adjacent to the suite, the master bedroom, in the second story of the home's rear turret, would be so easy to overdo, with its lovely angles and views created by the tower's roundness and by vista. But the Hodgsons have kept it simple with a reeded maple bedroom set, green wallpaper patterned like water running down glass, and floral swags that required 25 yards of fabric yet do not obscure the beauty of the room's eight windows.

By doing their own decorating, as well as the building, the Hodgsons have blended style with the substance of everyday living in their home: The kitchen mixes custom-made, frosted maple cabinetry; Corian countertops; and a built-in wine rack above the bar area with priceless art - two of the children's handprints in clay disks - and a stainless steel home/commercial stove with a big griddle so that Dad can cook the kids pancakes.

Across the hall from the kitchen, the combined formal living room and dining room are breathtakingly grand with a damask sofa and chairs, boxy furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows with royal gold, gathered draperies, and deep crown molding. Above an oversized mantelpiece hangs a piece of infinity, a still life of a moon snail shell that was painted by Mrs. Hodgson's brother. In this painting, the darkness and light seem to go on forever, not unlike the sound of the ocean in a real seashell. And like the seashells, this house, with its fresh approach to beach living, echoes too the timeless seashore that it calls home.