Distinctive Homes · by Lucy Probert
2024-04-01T11:00:00.000Z
New stone walls, built from old field stone, for a home on the Sakonnet River
Stone walls have lined the roads and fields of Little Compton since the 1700s, when farmers dug the stones out of the ground and stacked them into boundaries. When the owners of a property on the Sakonnet River planned a new home with architect Ron DiMauro of DiMauro Architects in Newport, they wanted stone walls to be part of it from the start — walls that would feel as though they had always been there.
Tom O'Connor was asked to find native stone for roughly 100 linear feet of new wall around the barn, pool house and pool, and to build it so that it reads as original to the land. Finding the stone was the hard part. Field stone changes from town to town — Aquidneck Island runs to blue shale, Tiverton to granite, Little Compton to the rounded field stone of its old walls — so the search stayed close to home. A nearby farmer had piles of stone from walls he had taken down; Tom rebuilt a wall for him in exchange for the stones, and the new walls went up from stone that had been stacked by hand on neighboring land a century before.
As Ron DiMauro put it, there is a good chance that someone else touched these very stones a hundred years ago, so there is already a history in them. Read the article in Distinctive Homes.
