A six-cottage compound in Cape Cod National Seashore has hit the market for $6.5 million
The Truro listing bills the property as a “blank slate just waiting to be developed to your personal taste.” .
It’s not often you find an oceanfront home for sale in Truro — let alone six.
A six-cottage compound built in 1960 hit the market late last month for $6,500,000. Billed as the largest private oceanfront compound on the Cape Cod highlands, the 7.28-acre property at 17 Coast Guard Road in Truro features a staircase descending to 250 feet of private beach within the Cape Cod National Seashore.
But it’s most likely the lucky buyer will be acquiring this piece of property for the oceanfront location rather than the six cottages upstairs.
“It’s rare you see this type of parcel come along on the ocean side,” said Rose Kennedy, the listing agent and a sales associate at Kinlin Grover Real Estate. “Most of our building sites are on the bay side.”
Cottage colonies like the one at 17 Coast Guard Road were once highly popular on the Outer Cape, especially as it boomed as a vacation destination in the early 1900s. The cottages were often built with cedar shingles or wood planks, but vestiges of the cottage-vacation era are largely found on the Cape Cod Bay side of Outer Cape municipalities.
Atlantic-side cottages are largely out of private ownership reach due to the Cape Cod National Seashore and accessible only through hard-to-obtain rental programs, like the residency application process for the nineteen Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District in Provincetown.
“There’s very little, if any, cottage groups on the ocean side,” Kennedy said. “It’s kind of an era gone by. You don’t see it very much anymore.”
The Truro listing bills the property as a “blank slate just waiting to be developed to your personal taste,” all but asking for the rustic cottages to give way to modern development. But there are limits to how much can get built on the compound.
Truro leaders passed a size cap in 2017 on homes built along the Cape Cod National Seashore. While it’s still possible to build a new home, its maximum size depends on the size of the lot. In this case, anything north of roughly 4,300 square feet requiring special permitting.
“It’s not that you can’t build a nice, beautiful house, but Truro and Wellfleet don’t want to turn into the Hamptons and have the mega-mansions. They want the coast to remain the coast,” Kennedy said. “They want to keep Truro the way it is and not have a 10,000-square-foot home built with 15 bedrooms.
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