ABOVE: The Moores added a cupola, which overlooks the
entryway. The one-time upholstery shop is now a master suite
on the upper level; the kids’ room and the living room are
below. BELOW: The art is from Acushnet Art Antiques in New
Bedford. FACING PAGE: The deer antlers come from the Moores’
property in Maine; the awning is cedar shingles.
Follow the Circle
The renovation took the family about two years to complete
and the goal was to do it on as tight a budget as possible.
Previous owners had squared off the hut’s rounded interior
walls, making it easier for the builder but significantly
reducing the amount of living space. The Moores removed
those angles to reveal the hut’s dome structure and sprayed
the surface with insulation foam. It was then sanded and
mixed with plaster and popcorn paint to simulate a rough
finish. The floors came from vintage sources on Craigslist.
“We pieced them together and stained them a similar color,”
Blair says. All the custom shelves and paneling are fashioned
from old fences that had been discarded from the set of PBS’s
“The Victory Garden.” The windows were pulled out of old
houses in Newport. The only new materials are the insulation,
the faucets, bathroom fixtures and some of the lights. “It
was an experiment for us to see how little we wasted and to
buy as little as possible,” she says. “In the home-building
business, we see so much waste. We wanted to create a
cohesive, functional, beautiful space and be 100 percent
sustainable. We got to 97 percent.”
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l SEPTEMBER 2020 77