The first floor has a foyer, a galley kitchen, a full bathroom, and a fourteen-by-twenty-two foot dining and living room. A Vermont Casting wood stove keeps the furnace from having to fire up on all but the most severe winter nights. The futon sofa can be converted into a queen-size bed. A CD player, with in-wall Cambridge Sound System tweeters and a floor sub-woofer are tied into the bare minimum of cable TV. Susan has done a charming job of painting yard-sale furniture for the dining room. Outside, a mahogany and pressure-treated, twenty- by eight-foot porch looks over the concrete seawall down to the beach, thirty feet away from the sometimes calm and sometimes roiling ocean.

THE SECOND FLOOR

The second floor has three bedrooms and a half-bathroom. The Peach Bedroom is pretty standard, with two single beds, a small closet, and windows that look out over the neighbor's close house and the active front street of Brant Rock. The Green Bedroom has a four-poster bed elevated above the stairwell and a small view of the ocean...it is the favored bedroom for young and middle-aged adults because of its loft-like mood, but it is not appropriate for the young, the infirm, sleepwalkers, acrophobics, and old folks.

THE MASTER BEDROOM

The master bedroom on the second floor may be our favorite area of the house. It has almost the same dimensions as the living and dining room downstairs, about fourteen by twenty-two feet wide. A cathedral ceiling slopes upward from the seaward winds, with a romantic, red hardwood ceiling fan pushing air down in the summer and up in the winter. We've left one of our older Pentium computers on a glass table in one corner of the room. It may be a little outdated, but it has Windows, WordPerfect, and a wonderful screenplay-writing program called Movie Magic Screen Writer, on which the great American screenplay could definitely be written. On one wall we've wired another set of Cambridge SoundWorks tweeters and a subwoofer controlled by a remote control from the downstairs stereo system. In the opposite corner, a whirlpool tub accommodates two. A full expanse glass storm door opens out onto a sixteen-by-eight foot deck that has absolutely incredible views from the Provincetown tower in the east-southeast, to the Scituate lighthouse northwards, to the unobstructed boat route eastward to England.

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THE BASEMENT

There is no basement to the house, since it's perched high atop thirteen marine-grade pilings buried ten to twenty-five feet in the sand. Firewood is stored underneath the street-side stairs. A cold-water shower at the bottom of the oceanside stairs eliminates much of the sand that would otherwise be brought inside the house. The cement patio deck abutting the seawall is one of three outside places, including the house's two decks, where we can enjoy the ocean and the bustling beach.

THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE

We bought a hundred-year-old, seasonal, French Garrison beach house July 1, 1991. The old house had been propped up on its small pilings thirty feet from high tide for a hundred years before we bought it, and long before the government built a sea wall against the swelling torrents. Four months later, the tempest variously called the No-name Nor'easter, the Halloween Storm, and the Perfect Storm destroyed it, and we and several of our neighbors had to rebuild.

We designed the new house to blend into the old community, to withstand virtually all but an apocalyptic hurricane, and to suit our needs for a year-round beach house. Our oceanfront there is crowded with houses, so we had to develop a design that would fit comfortably into the tiny, 29- by 80-ft lot, and the result was very gratifying. At high tide, with a storm rocking the house on its tall pilings, and with two banks of windows looking out over the ocean, it's almost like we're on a cruise ship, but better. On each level of the house, we can look through a door and four windows at the tremendous power of Mother Nature...or, more often, her becalming serenity.