A4 Architecture Blog
A4 Hope Funds
A4 Architecture has had the honor and pleasure of designing all of the Hope Funds Award of Excellence Galas since 2007. Their events have been in all over, but they keep returning to host in beautiful Newport. Events are hosted in the historic mansions of Newport,...
Newport Bridge Realignment
The long-awaited construction and redesign of the main roads connecting the Pell Bridge to Newport has commenced after more than a decade of planning. The goal of the project and reconfiguration of the roads surrounding this area is to improve traffic flow and to help...
Car Museum Project
Sometimes at the beginning of a project the client comes to the architect with a project goal that seems like it just might be too challenging or insolvable. When a husband and wife pair of car collectors had purchased an old plumbing warehouse and wanted to convert...
Tennis at the Newport Casino
When the Newport Casino was first built in 1880, the game of lawn tennis was a new but quickly growing sport. The game had been derived from the more complicated and architecturally involved game now known as Real Tennis, which had been invented in the 13th century in...
George Champlin Mason Sr.
Among the many great architects who have worked in Newport, RI over the years, George Champlin Mason Sr. is perhaps the greatest and most prolific “Home-Grown” talent. He was born in 1820 in Newport to a prominent family and was the great nephew of Oliver Hazard...
Old Colony House
Newport is a place of authentic architectural monuments and living history. The houses of the Point and Historic Hill have been in many cases occupied for as long as 250-300 years. That means that potentially 50-60 generations of people have lived, raised their...
Rough Point
Newport is filled with great buildings that have been modified over time, either by other great architects or which were replaced by buildings that today the Historic District Commission would no longer allow to be replaced. This means we might have had the old...
Ocean Ave Craftsman
When houses were laid out in a small residential development called Chartier Circle back in the 1950s, little-to-no attention was paid to the spectacular views the area enjoyed. This now Ocean Ave Craftsman style cottage was one of the prime sites at the time, and all...
Preservation Society of Newport County
Before the founding of the Preservation Society, Newport was both very different than it once was as well as different from what it has now become. In 1945, the glories of the Gilded Age were long past, broken by the 4 sequential catastrophes of World War I, the...
Newport Architectural Forum
Newport, as many historians have noted over the years, is an architectural treasure chest. From the Colonial Era, to early Victorian, to the Gilded Age, and finally, to present times, Newport has an amazing breadth and depth of architectural gems for a community that...
13 Ways to Scare Away your Architect
There are things that a client can say that will scare a good architect and/or contractor away without you even realizing it. Here are 13 things I have heard said either directly or indirectly over the years that scared me or another professional away. They are a...
The Why of Me
The Why of Me: “Why do each of us do what we do, and why do we do it where we do it?” are questions everyone can examine closely and find interesting discoveries about their past and realizations about who they are. A long time ago, I was just a boy from suburbia who...