The towns surrounding Boston are a hive of building and remodeling work, so I’m not exaggerating when I say that if you stopped in at my local building department in Wellesley, Mass., you would learn that the department issues about 80 permits a year for new homes. Of those 80 permits, most are for expensive spec homes being built from plans that look like they all came from the same house-design website or that include default details that seemingly came straight from house-design software. For the seven to eight houses my company builds each year, we try to be the exception rather than the norm.

Wellesley is full of historic houses, so we like to give a nod to the surrounding architecture by incor­porating classic details in our new builds. One of our favorite custom elements is to change up the type of siding on different parts of a house. For ­instance, it’s not uncommon for us to side the main house with cedar shingles, the garage with vertical board-and-batten siding, and the mudroom connector between them with clapboards. This gives the house the look of having been added on to over the years. We also can create that traditional vibe by changing just a small section of siding, such as on the upper part of a gable end. Instead of simply running the siding material all the way up, we ­often use shiplap boards to set off the gables.

A three-person team—two installers working from staging who feed measurements to another worker at a cut station on the ground—can side a large gable end in an hour or two. It’s a minimal change in installation technique from that used on the clapboards covering the rest of the house, as well as an upcharge for the wider boards, but it makes a substantial impact on the look and feel of the exterior.

John Hourihan is director of operations at Riverstone Custom Builders in Wellesley, Mass., and a Fine Homebuilding ambassador. Photos by Justin Fink.

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