The design recalls elements of 19th-century Shingle Style architecture but it is not pigeonholed or constrained by the suggestion of any rigid historical context. It is adapted to the creative whims of an elderly client with an affinity for entertaining, a purposeful woman with defined if eclectic preconceptions of what she wanted in a manor house for an extended family. It is ecologically sensitive to its varied natural surroundings, an area as much a sanctuary as a building site. It is both elegant and freewheeling, with sections developed organically, pulled together beneath a complex roof system incorporating gables, dormers, conical silo caps and flared eaves. All this, on a craggy Newport hilltop overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.