Before the Playwrights Arrive, Wellfleet Weighs the Porches

WELLFLEET · THE COLONY · HEARING THURSDAY, NOV. 5

Three 1948 cottages go before Wellfleet's Historical Commission on Nov. 5, a public step toward a 2028 playwrights' center.

6 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

A Wellfleet legal notice, printed twice in the Provincetown Independent this month, asks permission to put a porch back the way it was. The wording is plain: "return porch to original design and convert it back to 4 season porch." The building is listed as Unit 5 at "The Colony" (c. 1948), and its neighbor on the same notice, Unit 6, asks for the same porch work. Unit 4, the third cottage on the list, asks for repairs and the removal of later additions.

The applicant line reads "Grace Ann Nordoff, Carry It On LLC." The town's posted agenda spells it the same way. Everywhere else we checked, including the name of the theater center planned there, it's spelled Nordhoff. The reason a town board is reading about porches off Chequessett Neck Road has to do with who built these cottages, who kept them, and who plans to fill them next.

So what, exactly, is Wellfleet being asked to decide on Nov. 5? The answer starts where the notice does, in 1948.

A Brahmin who championed modern art

Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver P. Morton designed the cottages in 1948 and opened them as the Mayo Hill Colony Club, which Bards on the Bay's history of the property calls "a private enclave and gallery for artists and their patrons." A 2020 Independent story describes Saltonstall as an openly gay Boston Brahmin and a champion of modern art and architecture, who used the place to draw wealthy patrons and artists to Wellfleet.

The buildings are small, about 400 to 800 square feet by that 2020 account, and the seasonal ones all had fireplaces. From the road, that story said, all you could see was a sand-colored cement bas-relief wall by the artist Xavier Gonzalez and a flat-roofed cottage that began as the gallery. The Independent called the cottages "mini relics" of the Bauhaus movement.

"Wanted to like her guests"

In 1963, Loris and Eleanor Stefani acquired the cottages, renamed them the Colony, and opened them to the public. Public, with a screening: Eleanor interviewed would-be guests, her son Jeffrey told the Independent in 2020, because she "wanted to like her guests."

The guest list over the years is long. TheaterMania and the center's own history name Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Bernard Malamud, and Lionel and Diana Trilling, and the 2020 Independent adds Joanne Woodward alongside Newman. They came to stay. The record has them as visitors to a place of cottages and a gallery, not as performers on any stage.

Jeffrey inherited the property in 2019 and, with his wife Mihae, kept renting the cottages until this year's sale, the Independent reported in July. Along the way, three original cottages were sold off separately, and two of their new owners asked the Historical Commission to let them demolish. The commission can't forbid a demolition, but it imposed 18-month delays. One owner came back with a plan that keeps the original cottage and adds to it, and that delay was lifted. Those cottages are not the ones on the Nov. 5 agenda. The Stefanis began a National Register application in 2004, the same story notes, and never finished it.

Sixty-three years, then a beeline

Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer-winning playwright who lives in Wellfleet, had never stayed at the Colony, the Independent reported. "When it came on the market, I made a beeline over," she said. She took the idea to Grace Nordhoff, a philanthropist who grew up in the Seattle area, and recalled the answer: "Sure, let's do it." In March, Nordhoff bought what remained through Carry It On LLC, ending 63 years of Stefani ownership.

The plan, as the Independent laid it out, is that Nordhoff restores the cottages and leases the property to Bards on the Bay, a nonprofit whose founders are Vogel, Nordhoff, and Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company from 1982 to 2023. American Theatre reports summer residencies of one to three weeks for playwrights and theatrical composers, planned after the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Lark, and Space at Ryder Farm closed. Nominated playwrights would attend free, according to the Independent. Off-season, Maso said, "programs will be focused on community needs and be artist-centric."

The center will carry the name of Grace's mother. Nancy Nordhoff co-founded Hedgebrook in 1988, a free residency for women writers on former farmland on Whidbey Island, Washington, and died in January at 93. The Wellfleet center, the Independent noted, won't be limited to women.

Thursday, 5 p.m., on Zoom

The town's posted agenda lists three items for 25 Way 55, one per unit. Each is a partial demolition: replacing deteriorated materials in kind, upgrading roofs and windows, removing later, non-original structures and alterations, and rebuilding a concrete-block wing wall. Unit 5 adds the porch. Unit 6 adds the porch too, plus removing an exterior door so the bathroom can be wheelchair accessible and taking out a block flue that no longer serves a purpose.

The agenda doesn't name a bylaw for the Colony items. The town's Historical Commission FAQ explains the usual path: buildings more than 75 years old are subject to review, partial demolition needs a permit, and significant buildings are referred to the commission. Under the town's bylaw, if the commission finds the work would "destroy or substantially diminish" historic value, it can delay it for up to 18 months. If the Colony items follow that path, the question on Nov. 5 would be whether taking these three cottages back toward their original design counts as that kind of loss. A review is not an approval of the playwrights' center itself.

The hearing is Thursday, Nov. 5, at 5 p.m., on Zoom, according to the legal notice and the town's agenda. If Bards on the Bay holds its schedule, the next date on the Colony's calendar after that is a summer in 2028, when the first playwrights are due in rooms Saltonstall drew for art patrons.

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