by Tim Gilmore, 12/12/2012
cont’d from Octagon Beach Suite, Part 1: South Ponte Vedra and Crescent Beach: “Marshes to the Sea”
The octagon as a dwelling shape dates back to the Victorians. It’s often rather loosely called the “Octagon style” of architecture. And for the Victorians, the specificity of the octagon — not a hexagon, not a decagon — was important.
In the 1850s, an amateur historian and architect named Orson Squire Fowler published a book called A Home for All, in which he accredited a motley array of lifestyle benefits to living in an eight-sided house. Ironically, his list didn’t include improving the view on the beach.
He claimed that the octagonal shape allowed 20 percent more floor space than the same wall length in a square house.
from Water’s Edge magazine, 2003, original photograph by Ed Hall
Fowler had been a medical student and was also a practitioner of that 19th century pseudo-medical craze known as phrenology, which claimed that character traits could be ascertained by studying the contours of a person’s skull. Not surprisingly, then, he also attributed health benefits to the octagon house, attained mainly through better ventilation and lighting.
More than a thousand octagon houses were built around the nation in the decade after A Home for All was published, but the first octagon house in North Florida, located in St. Augustine, wasn’t built until 1886.
the Clapp Octagon House, at 62 Lighthouse Avenue, St. Augustine
Though the house is considered one of the area’s first beach cottages, its characteristics are markedly Victorian compared to more contemporary octagon houses. The ground floor is more spacious than the top floor, while the top floor is the primary space in most of this home’s contemporary cousins. There is also considerably more wall space than window space, diminishing the view out of the house.
cont’d as Octagon Beach Suite, Part 3: Shapes of Rooms and Staircases and Flying Saucers
