Workshop/APD | Nantucket MA

The Courtyard House: Conscious Select × Workshop/APD

‍Workshop/APD was founded in New York in 1999 by Matt Berman and Andrew Kotchen, on the belief that architecture and interior design are strongest when developed as one discipline rather than two. Nearly 25 years and offices in New York, Nantucket, Greenwich, Minneapolis, and South Florida later, that founding idea still shapes how the firm works: architects, interior designers, and product specialists at the same table, from the first sketch onward. The firm has no single signature style — each project is led by site, client, and program — but the work is unmistakable in its discipline: obsessively detailed, intentional, and built for how a space will actually be lived in.

The Courtyard House on Nantucket is the clearest expression of what that looks like in practice.

The Project

The project is a single-family residence on Nantucket, Massachusetts, completed in 2022. Workshop/APD held the scope for both architecture and interior design, an arrangement that allowed the two to develop together rather than in sequence.‍ ‍

The site sits back from the oceanfront, fully screened from view by the surrounding landscape. Rather than treat that as a limitation, Workshop/APD used it as license: with no exterior views to court, the design turns inward, organizing the entire home around a central courtyard lush with native plantings, a zero-edge pool, and generous al fresco living space. From outside, the house reads as restrained and familiar — simple, shingled gable forms that nod to Nantucket's earliest Shaker buildings. Inside the courtyard, it opens into something quietly modern.

The interiors carry that same tension. Cool, neutral, and minimal, built from a considered material palette of wood, natural stone, and dark metal, they stand deliberately apart from the courtyard's bolder, sun-warmed hues — a contrast that makes the home feel like a retreat rather than a display.

CS Design Values

Working with Nature. Landscape, light, and site are integrated rather than overridden.

Material Honesty. Natural, uncoated, age-gracefully materials chosen over synthetic or trend-driven surfaces.

Sourced with Intention. Reclaimed, vintage, locally sourced, o

Why It's Consciously Selected ‍

Nantucket residential design carries its own set of clichés — the same shingles, the same nautical shorthand, applied without much thought. The Courtyard House avoids all of it by taking the island's architectural history seriously instead of decorating with it: the gable forms are real historical reference, not costume, and the courtyard is a genuine response to the constraints of the site rather than a design flourish. It is disciplined, site-specific, and built to last. That is enough.