We’re in Harwich, heading upstairs at the Old Bank Street Firehouse.
It was the town’s first firehouse, built circa 1927.
Retired Fire Chief Norman Clarke is giving a public tour of the newly repurposed building, including three affordable apartments on the second floor.
“When this was a firehouse — active firehouse — the space was all wide open,” he says.
The old firehouse had a day room, kitchen, and bathroom, but it was mostly one big space.
“So, when we started this project, we gutted everything,” he says. “They're all one-bedroom apartments. … We have nice countertops. The bathrooms are tiled.”
A few years ago, the building was slated for demolition.
The nonprofit Harwich Fire Association proposed buying the building to house an antique fire truck. But the $300,000 price, plus restoration, was more than the group could afford.
Then, the Harwich Conservation Trust got involved, and the town helped with funding.
Clarke says the project turned into a community effort, adapting the century-old firehouse for modern needs — including workforce housing.
“At least two of the three apartments have to be local preference,” he says. “We're hoping that all three will be local preference. We already have … a new police officer who commutes from Falmouth every day that's ready to go.”
On the first floor, the Fire Association got space for the historic fire engine, plus a room for social gatherings overlooking the Harwich Conservation Trust’s Robert F. Smith Cold Brook Preserve.
Architects call this repurposing “adaptive reuse.” The Old Bank Street Firehouse was such a great example, it caught the eye of the Boston Society of Architects.
The group recently published its first-ever guidebook to adaptive reuse, and the guide focuses entirely on the Cape and Islands.
The Society of Architects began thinking about the unique conditions on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in 2024, when the state’s Affordable Homes Act created a formal designation for seasonal communities. The group looked into what the designation would mean, said Wandy Pascoal, senior manager of the group’s Future Forms Lab.
“We recognized that this is an area that has very different housing challenges than the ones that we … experience in the Greater Boston region,” she said.
The designation aims to protect — and help fund — year-round housing in communities where prices get pushed upward by a housing market heavy with vacation homes. Reuse of older buildings is one way communities find space for housing.
“It was actually mentioned to us by one of our partners to look into adaptive reuse, because they were seeing more projects like these come online,” Pascoal said.
In addition to Harwich, the guidebook describes case studies from Barnstable, Bourne, Aquinnah, Tisbury, and Nantucket.
On Nantucket, the case study of adaptive reuse is a single-family home. It’s not antique; it was built in 1996.
But the owners wanted to build new, so they donated the house to the nonprofit group Housing Nantucket, said Anne Kuszpa, executive director.
“It benefits them to donate it to us,” she said, “because if they don't, then it goes into the landfill. It needs to get demolished, and then all of that material is construction demolition material that needs to get taken and shipped off-island.”
The owners donated money to move the house onto land Housing Nantucket already owned.
Moving a house eliminates the effort, expense, and carbon footprint of bringing new materials to the island for affordable housing. And a bonus: Like so many Nantucket homes, this one has character, Kuszpa said.
“It's got all this exposed wood, and it's very bright, and … it's like that old, charming Nantucket-home feel,” she said. That feeling “gets lost if all of these older structures are in the landfill.”
Housing Nantucket expanded the house by adding a full basement, making it a two-bedroom home instead of one. The total cost was about $550,000 for a home that would have cost about $1.2 million new.
Miranda D'Oleo, manager of the Building Advocacy Lab at the Boston Society of Architects, said adaptive reuse hits a sweet spot — blending environmental responsibility, historic preservation, and affordable housing.
And nowhere is that clearer than on the Cape and Islands.
“These are buildings people walk by every day,” D’Oleo said. “The community knows them.” So, watching those buildings add value to the community, instead of losing their value and being demolished, “is something that is really highlighting the opportunity of design within this region.”
At a time when creating more housing is on so many minds, the architects’ guidebook affirms what people on the Cape and Islands have been saying for years: There are more paths to housing than just building new.
