Bermuda Houses — Key Ideas to Explore

Shipwrights as Housebuilders

The preface explicitly states that Bermuda's building traditions were “interpreted by shipwrights rather than housebuilders.” This is not a generic observation about vernacular architecture; it is a precise claim about craft transfer. The excerpts show that Humphreys sees this as key to the islands' architectural character. The builders applied ship-joining techniques to houses, producing structures that differed from both English prototypes and later West Indian-influenced designs. The text notes that verandas were rare in early houses—a surprise to American visitors—because interiors stayed cooler and insects were unscreened. When verandas did appear in the nineteenth century, they seemed “more tropical or West Indian in character than the earlier houses, peculiarly Bermudian.” This distinction between two building phases is a recurring thread.

The Welcoming Arms and Other Features

Humphreys devotes careful attention to specific architectural elements that emerge from local conditions. The long exterior stairways on sloping sites, built with brick risers and stone parapets, are called “Welcoming Arms” in Bermuda—a term he explains as significant of Bermudian hospitality. These steps widen at the bottom, and the landing walls often slant outward, producing a “peculiar, tub-like effect.” Another distinctive feature is the projecting vestibule or waiting room, a small square or half-octagon space left open to visitors at all times, furnished with a table and a hand bell for announcing one's presence. The door from this room to the house proper was the occupant's protection from intrusion. Humphreys describes these elements without romanticizing them, grounding them in practical needs: shelter from sun and rain, and controlled access.

Slave Quarters and Site Choices

The excerpts include a frank mention of slave quarters. Houses built on sloping ground—a deliberate choice for hurricane protection—had a high basement wall on the lower side. This basement space, “partially cut out from the natural rock, damp and almost totally dark,” was originally used for slave quarters with its own cooking fireplace, or for storage. Humphreys notes that in his own time this lower part was little used, sometimes serving as a stable or, rarely, converted into habitable rooms. The passage is brief but significant: it ties the architecture directly to the social and economic history of Bermuda, showing how building form followed the needs of a slaveholding, agricultural, and seafaring society. The catalog subjects do not mention slavery, but the text does not avoid it.

Humphreys writes as an architect addressing other architects, not as a historian or travel writer. His evidence is photographic (the book includes plates) and diagrammatic, with recurring plan types shown in diagrams. Readers should expect a technical but accessible analysis, focused on how climate, materials, and craft produced a distinctive domestic architecture. The excerpts are incomplete—they break off before discussing later houses or towns—but the core argument about simplicity and appropriateness is clear throughout.

Years among these shelves, I’ve noticed how Bermuda Houses speaks of shipwrights fashioning homes from salt air and stone, and it brings to mind a quieter kinship with Phil May: Sketches from "Punch." — Themes and Context. Both capture lives shaped by place, drawn with faithful, unhurried lines. There is a gentle honesty in each, a shared way of seeing simple people and their weathered truths.