PARNAGIAN ARCHITECTS
CONTENTS
- The Salt Box
-
Somers Point Paddle Club
-
Trimmer Road
-
Gap House
- Two Hill
- Red House
-
Brigantine Paddle Club
-
River Retreat
-
Marin Hill
- High Bar Pavilion
- Ranch Reno
-
Lake House
-
Beach Roost
// About Us
// Press
// News
// Inquiries
// Opportunities
We are an award-winning modern architecture practice based in New Jersey. Recognized for unique, high-quality design, we provide architectural, planning, interior design and construction management services across a range of project types.
︎ ︎ ︎
32 Monmouth Street, Floor 3
Red Bank, New Jersey 07701
Somers Point Paddle Club
A contemporary waterfront private pool club rooted in the maritime architecture and coastal heritage of Somers Point.
Location:
Somers Point, New Jersey
Status:
Completed, 2026
Press:
Developer:
Scarborough Properties
Builder:
Massett Building Company
Photography:
Halkin Mason Photography
Somers Point, New Jersey
Status:
Completed, 2026
Press:
Developer:
Scarborough Properties
Builder:
Massett Building Company
Photography:
Halkin Mason Photography
The Somers Point Paddle Club transforms a cleared waterfront site into a gathering place organized around recreation, hospitality, and connection to the water. The principal challenge was to accommodate an intensive program while maintaining human scale and architectural clarity on a site shaped by the Bay Front Historic District, coastal regulation, flood requirements, and public waterfront access.
Rather than concentrate the program into a single mass, the project is conceived as a cloister of gabled volumes organized around an elevated pool deck. The strategy draws from Somers Point's maritime history, where boatyards and boathouses formed clusters of simple utilitarian structures. Early studies explored buildings of varying size, height, and orientation, with the spaces between them treated as active architectural "voids." This allows a substantial contemporary program to be experienced as a collection of intimate spaces rather than a singular large building.
Flood requirements became a generator of the architecture. FEMA required the principal occupied level and utilities to be elevated approximately seven feet above grade. Rather than treating this elevation as a technical necessity, the project transforms it into a continuous inhabited platform connecting pools, terraces, lounges, dining, and covered exterior spaces. Flush thresholds maintain accessible circulation throughout, while both the elevated restaurant pavilion and the surrounding pool deck gain expansive views across the adjacent marina and above the boats docked below.
Arrival reinforces this transition. Ipe-clad stairs and ramps extend the material language of the marina upward to an entry "boardwalk," where they transition to porcelain paving within the club. The main pool is aligned with the primary entry, drawing visitors through the covered entrance hall toward water and sky.
A restrained coastal material palette further connects the project to its setting. Cedar shakes wrap the primary gabled volumes; dark horizontal fiber cement siding and stone form a quiet base; and vertical cedar screens define guardrails and rainscreen surfaces, subtly recalling the dune fencing characteristic of the region's beaches. Lower cabanas and pergolas extend this language around the pool deck, creating shade and more intimate places of retreat.
Throughout the day, sunlight reflected from the pools moves across the ceilings and soffits of the restaurant, bar, and cabanas, extending the presence of water into the architecture itself. The result is a contemporary maritime village in which resilience, accessibility, materiality, historic context, and waterfront experience are integrated into a single architectural environment.
Rather than concentrate the program into a single mass, the project is conceived as a cloister of gabled volumes organized around an elevated pool deck. The strategy draws from Somers Point's maritime history, where boatyards and boathouses formed clusters of simple utilitarian structures. Early studies explored buildings of varying size, height, and orientation, with the spaces between them treated as active architectural "voids." This allows a substantial contemporary program to be experienced as a collection of intimate spaces rather than a singular large building.
Flood requirements became a generator of the architecture. FEMA required the principal occupied level and utilities to be elevated approximately seven feet above grade. Rather than treating this elevation as a technical necessity, the project transforms it into a continuous inhabited platform connecting pools, terraces, lounges, dining, and covered exterior spaces. Flush thresholds maintain accessible circulation throughout, while both the elevated restaurant pavilion and the surrounding pool deck gain expansive views across the adjacent marina and above the boats docked below.
Arrival reinforces this transition. Ipe-clad stairs and ramps extend the material language of the marina upward to an entry "boardwalk," where they transition to porcelain paving within the club. The main pool is aligned with the primary entry, drawing visitors through the covered entrance hall toward water and sky.
A restrained coastal material palette further connects the project to its setting. Cedar shakes wrap the primary gabled volumes; dark horizontal fiber cement siding and stone form a quiet base; and vertical cedar screens define guardrails and rainscreen surfaces, subtly recalling the dune fencing characteristic of the region's beaches. Lower cabanas and pergolas extend this language around the pool deck, creating shade and more intimate places of retreat.
Throughout the day, sunlight reflected from the pools moves across the ceilings and soffits of the restaurant, bar, and cabanas, extending the presence of water into the architecture itself. The result is a contemporary maritime village in which resilience, accessibility, materiality, historic context, and waterfront experience are integrated into a single architectural environment.