The Houses · H-02
Shore House
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia · Established 1978 · Open to visitors
Shore House was a working boatyard and is still, on three days of the week, a working boatyard.
- Region
- North America
- Residential places
- 16
- Residential periods
- Sixteen places. Residential periods of three to twelve days; the shop takes two residents at a time.
- Public gathering
- Seasonal shared meal and lecture, spring and autumn. Booking advised; the room holds sixty.
- Arrival
- An hour and a quarter from Halifax. The house is on the harbour road; there is no sign.
- Access
- The kitchen, meeting room, and one bedroom are step-free. The shop floor is uneven and has a raised sill.
- Correspondence
- Write to the steward at Shore House.
The house
The house was given to the Institute in 1978 by a family who had built boats on the site for four generations and had run out of sons willing to do it. The condition of the gift was that the shop keep working. It has.
The oral history program began by accident in 1981, when a resident with a borrowed cassette recorder started asking the older men in the shop how they had learned to loft a hull. There are now four hundred and twelve recordings, and the earliest of them are the reason the house owns a dehumidifier of alarming size.
The annual reconciliation of the Common Record has been held here since 1990, in the week after the shop closes for the winter.
The work
- Coastal restoration with the county: marram planting, culvert clearing, and the long argument with erosion that nobody expects to win outright.
- A grief support group, held fortnightly and open to anyone in the town, run in partnership with the district health authority. It is not a Continuance observance and does not use Continuance vocabulary.
- Maritime oral history: recording, transcription, and deposit of copies with the provincial archive.
Observance kept here
Repair before replacement
Nothing in the house is replaced until somebody has tried to mend it and said out loud why the mend failed.
The shared forms, here
- The Weather Entry
- The tide and the state of the landing are entered with the weather, in the same hand.
Kept in use
The kitchen bell
Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.
The white cups
Tea, at the table and at the bench. They recur in house photographs from the late seventies onward, which is an accident of ordering and not a design.
Local participation
- The boat-shed and slip inspection, monthly and after any gale.
- The winter phone round, shared between four members.
- Separation
- A member says so to the steward once. No reason is entered. The house writes once to acknowledge and then not again.
The steward
Peter Amiot
Boatbuilder · steward since 2016
Forty-one years in the trade, nineteen of them in this shop. Keeps the recordings and will not be drawn on which is his favourite.
Records
Other houses
- North House — Penobscot County, Maine
- South House — Southland, South Island
Entry H-02 · reviewed 2 February 2026