A beach house is a house on or near a beach, sometimes used as a vacation or second home for people who commute to the house on weekends or during vacation periods. Beach houses are often designed to weather the type of climate they are built in and the building materials and construction methods used in beach housing vary widely around the world.
Beach houses are often associated with beach gardens with a special planting and a particular type of leisure use. One of the most famous twentieth century beach gardens was constructed by Derek Jarman at Dungeness, England. It celebrated local materials, native plants and the openness of the site. Other beach gardens have tried to create an isolated microclimate. Swimming pools are popular in beach gardens. American architect Andrew Geller designed sculptural beach houses in the coastal regions of New England during the 1950s and 60s.
Famous quotes containing the words beach and/or house:
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”
—Truman Capote (20th century)