ARROWSIC

You can almost see it: In the early 1950s, a man named Phinney was hammering away on the roof of his Arrowsic home — a home he designed and constructed almost singlehandedly a breath away from the Kennebec River.

You can almost hear it: Neighbors whispering to each other, commenting on the unconventional design, “A flat roof in Maine? What about the snow?”

Phinney, you can imagine, ignored the neighbors’ comments as he labored day by day. It was his design and, odd as his choices may have seemed, he had his reasons.

“It didn’t seem to give much credit to the builder,” said Henry Petroski, author of “The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors.” The book, published recently by Norton, is an examination of the Arrowsic home handbuilt by Bob Phinney, which Petroski and his wife Catherine bought in 1997.

Petroski, an engineering and history professor at Duke University in North Carolina, has authored 17 books that center on engineering and design. Among his best known work are “To Engineer is Human” and “The Pencil.”

With a penchant for investigating the history of everyday objects, Petroski said, “it seemed logical to look at the house as an object,” in examining and researching the “curious structure” he inhabits.

As the title states, the three-bedroom home has a surplus of closets and passthrough doors, crafted by Phinney, which Petroski said are emblematic of the uniqueness of the home that defied the pre-fab sensibilities of the 1950s.

“I began to wonder why he did it — why he did what he did,” said Petroski. “He obviously had to make a lot of design decisions.”

Petroski was first drawn to Maine on the coattails of his wife Catherine, also an author, who was conducting research for her book “A Bride’s Passage.” Having explored the region, Petroski and Catherine purchased a home to serve as a writing retreat for the busy authors.

“The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors” is illustrated with photographs by Catherine, which Petroski said, gave him a new perspective of, and aesthetic appreciation for, the house.

“It was the view that we first fell in love with,” Petroski said. “We didn’t give the house much thought.

“The way I tell it in the book is that we started out with these chairs facing out,” he added, sitting beside Catherine in two rockers facing a row of five picture windows. “We were fascinated by the river, but then we turned the chairs around and started looking at the walls and the workmanship.”

The walls are panelled with earthy knotty pine boards, giving the space an air of summer camp eternal. Across each plank at equidistant intervals are rows of nails. Usually three small nails. Sometimes only two.

“This is over 60 years old now,” Petroski said of the immaculate walls. “It’s the original way that it was. If it was made out of drywall, it would have had to be painted and repainted.

“Everything he sawed or hammered is very neatly done,” he said. “There aren’t big gaps, he didn’t use moulding — I don’t know how he did it without bruising the wood.”

While examining the house, Petroski noted that the foundation seemed to have been laid with the intent of placing supports for a pitched roof and in the course of his research he uncovered a photographed model of the house that Phinney had designed preconstruction.

“I could see that his original concept was not the way it turned out, there were modifications,” said Petroski. “He divided the rooms differently and it didn’t have a flat roof in the model, it had a hip roof.”

These clear indications of the builder changing his design mid-progress, evident in the structure of the home, led Petroski deeper and deeper into the history of the house, and the mind of the man who built it.

The house was altered by a sucessive owner in the 1980s Petroski discovered, and with the addition of a second floor and pitched roof, it is now more conformed to standard designs — at least it appears to be at first glance. A subtle eye like Petroski’s, however, notes the disparities in the craftsmanship of altered sections of the house — the planks are not eased, or rounded, at the edges and the windows are framed with different cuts of wood.

Simplicity of design and economy of materials appear to be the driving force behind Phinney’s design, Petroski said, and, he speculates, a desire to build the house unaided.

The structure is a marvel of simplicity; the baseboard in the sitting room is one of the knotty pine panels oriented horizontally, the windowsills are also panels, laid flat so a single 2-by-8 plank runs from the interior to exterior of the house.

“He economized in his effort, in his materials, and clearly gave it a lot of thought,” Petroski said.

“If he had built a pitched roof, he would have had to do more complicated carpentry, and also, I speculate, that he would not have been able to do it himself,” he said. “He would have needed to have people help him lift heavier beams.

“Obviously, the roof would have been one of the last things he did, so maybe it was August, maybe summer was nearly over and he needed to finish quickly before the winter … but now we’re really speculating,” Petroski said, trailing musingly from the path of nonfiction to fiction.