Outer Banks Architecture: An Anthology of Outposts

North Carolina's barrier islands were the staging area for several developments in seaside architecture that took place between 1850 and 1950. In Outer Banks Architecture, Marimar McNaughton traces the evolution of the various architectural styles that make the Outer Banks so unique.The book opens with a look at the government-issued lifesavers' stations and lightkeepers' dwellings, built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this same period, privately owned hunting and shooting clubs appeared along the Currituck, Albemarle, Pamlico, and Core Sounds. These clubhouses -- from the spartan style of the 1879 headquarters of the Currituck Shooting Club, the oldest active hunt club in North America to the lavish Art Nouveau style of Corolla's Whalehead Club -- are covered in detail.Another section tells about the resort homes built in Nags Head between the 1860s and 1930s. Rustic in comparison to the grand homes the owners occupied on the mainland, these summer cottages now form a National Historic District called Old Nags Head Beach Cottage Row.From Old Nags Head, the book moves to the Flat Tops of Southern Shores, designed by Frank Stick immediately after World War II.The text is supplemented by black-and-white photographs -- many of them rarely seen -- throughout the book.