Not Your Average Farm Building

“I think once Anna and I met each other and started working together,” Mark said, “we realized that oyster farming was something that we were really passionate about doing together, for each other, and on our own.”

Thus, Deluxbury Sea Farm was born. The name is a wink-and-nod to the title the town has carried for years. “Anna, coming from South Carolina, thought that it was a great name, so we just embraced it,” Mark said.

Like its seeds-and-dirt counterpart, oyster farming requires a large amount of equipment and gear, including boats, and a place to store and repair said equipment, gear, and boats. The Bouthilliers knew if their business was going to be able to maintain its output, let alone grow, they were going to need a facility to accomplish all the farm’s tasks and needs. So, the couple decided to build next to their home in Duxbury.

 Now, if you really want to test your neighbors’ goodwill, float the idea of building a massive garage and oyster-processing facility next to your pre-Revolutionary War home on your decidedly historic and residential block. In a lot of areas, faster than you can say “Nextdoor” the pitchforks will be out and the torches aflame. But much to the Bouthilliers credit, they knew this, and realized that good fences aren’t the only things that make good neighbors in New England. Respecting the tradition of the area does, too.

“[It was] very important to us to make sure the building was in keeping with the rest of the street, including our antique house and other antique houses on the street,” Mark said. “We wanted it to look very traditional, but what's contained within it is very untraditional.”

To accomplish this tall task, Mark turned to a classmate (an elementary school classmate at that), Duxbury architect Jessica Williams. Small, coastal-town living comes with some benefits, including small-town connections.

“I've known Jess since we were little kids. We both grew up in town, in Duxbury,” Mark said. “I was excited once we had a project where we needed an architect to reach out to Jess and talk to her about it.”

Williams, with vast experience in and knowledge of the area, was the perfect choice for turning the Bouthilliers' multipronged needs into a singular, neighborhood-respecting vision. While the goals of the project seemed almost too numerous, and literally too big to be met in such a small area—a big workshop, a large boat shop, an oyster processing facility with walk-in refrigeration, a big office, and a big table, not to mention living space for friends and family to visit—Williams and the Bouthilliers had one secret weapon: a hill on the lot that slopes down and away from the street.

“We were able to put all the bigger facilities on the lower part of the slope,” Williams explained, “and keep the space on the top part of the slope, which is on the street side, in a scale that matched the property and the adjacent house.”

As the designs started to become more and more crystallized, Williams kept coming back to one way of visualizing the facility, where from a curb-appeal standpoint, passersby would see an era-appropriate barn (which, in reality, housed the accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, to meet living space needs), but as you go around the building and down the hill, a full-blown boat shop and oyster facility emerges. The idea was, for lack of a better term, to create a “mullet building.”

“[Williams] often called it the ‘mullet building:’ traditional in the front, and then modern in the back,” Anna said.