After all, it was only his second residential project after he moved back to Sarasota from Tallahassee in 1989. The first was a house for his parents — a not-unusual assignment for a young architect.
Peterson’s clients were prominent jewelers Everett McCarver and Roland Moser. They hired Peterson to design a house for them in Lido Shores, but sold the property before construction started. Needing a residence, they found a 1960 house, designed by French architect Peter Trouchaud for himself, with spectacular views of Big Pass. But the kitchen and the upstairs master bedroom were spartan. There was no pool or space for guests, and the whole house was tired, as a Realtor might say.
“They challenged me to do my best work,” said Peterson, admiringly. That was almost 20 years ago, and he vividly remembers the details of the extensive renovation and addition project.
It was fairly easy, he said, to add the elevated guest house, the pool and a connecting covered walkway; these structures conformed to FEMA regulations for building along the sea.
But he and contractor Pat Ball had to execute an “entire redo” of the existing house, including adding a new kitchen, sliding-glass doors, upstairs bedroom and rooftop sun deck, without exceeding FEMA’s “50-percent rule.” Otherwise, the house would have to be raised above the floodplain. They fought hard to keep costs down.
“It offered a lot of potential to create a waterfront compound. It is hard to get to, and hardly anyone knows it is there,” said Peterson.
“I was very proud of that project because it was an early one for me in terms of residential work.”
The compound, which is listed for sale at $3.6 million by Jennifer Linehan and Jami Kellogg of Michael Saunders Company, has 225 feet of beach, with views that stretch from Big Pass on the southwest to Plymouth Harbor on the north. On a half-acre, the two structures’ total living area is just under 6,500 square feet.The current owners bought the house in 1999 for $1.9 million. Their children are getting older now, so they have decided to downsize and sell their slice of paradise. The house was previously listed by a different agent at $5.9 million in 2009.
Linehan and Kellogg say the appeal of the property is that the main house is at ground level, the beach is ample and long, and the owner may keep boats at docks on both Big Pass and Bayou Louise. And, did they mention the views?
“The lot is unique — where it is placed on Siesta,” said Linehan. “There are only a few properties on this strip that have the view of Lido and the wide Gulf views. It also has the protection from Lido.”
The buyer, said Kellogg, will be, “like the current owners, someone who walks in and says, ‘I have to have this.’ And someone who appreciates this architectural style and the uniqueness of it.”
“He captured space in a creative way,” said Peterson of Trouchaud. “The scale and the structure was appropriate and not too voluminous.” Still, what is now the main room of the original house once contained many smaller rooms that Peterson and Ball gutted.
The house is believed to be one of only two homes designed by Trouchaud in Sarasota. He also designed a home for Dr. Preston Clement, his relative by marriage, said Peterson.
A devoted sailor, Trouchaud kept his sailboat nearby, north of the Siesta Drive bridge over Bayou Louise. He and architect Tim Seibert, then a young talent of the “Sarasota school,” used to go sailing together, and once headed to the Bahamas by boat when the local construction market dried up for a year in 1961.
“We were sailing buddies,” said Seibert by telephone from his home in Boca Grande. “He was a fine fellow, a real playboy — very French. His boat was named ‘Marastel,’ after one of his favorite vineyards in France. One of the goofier girls who used to sail around with him called it ‘The Marsupial.'”
In the main house, Trouchaud creatively used bricks on main walls and as accents — but these were not his grandfather’s bricks. Peterson said Trouchaud had them cast especially for the house with concave facets that add an interesting texture to the walls.
Trouchaud also laid the bricks in a gridded, rather than a staggered, pattern, just as the “Ocala block” was deployed by the Sarasota school architects.
“He was very French in his approach to architecture,” said Seibert. “He had a Beaux-Arts education.”
The main room has an open fireplace in the round, with a cast-iron array of sculpted dancers forming the firebox.
Expansive sliding-glass doors provide take-your-breath-away views of Big Pass and its finned mammalian inhabitants.
“We arranged for them,” said Kellogg as a pair of dolphins surfaced a dozen yards offshore.
From the front wall of the house, a cantilevered staircase rises to the second floor.
“You can’t even do that anymore,” said Linehan.
The covered walkway is built with “space columns” — posts made of two planks bolted one to each side of the beam, in the style of Paul Rudolph and other Sarasota school modernists in the 1940s and 1950s.