Beacon Hill Slate & Copper Roofing
Slate and copper roofing on Beacon Hill's Federal rowhouses. Hidden copper gutters, mansard slate, Architectural Commission work since 2005.
Beacon Hill sits under one of the strictest historic review boards in the country, and on these Federal brick rowhouses the roof is rarely just a slate field. Art Slate Roofing has worked Beacon Hill for over twenty years. The owner walks every roof, we measure on site, and the same in-house crew installs what we quote. On a house that was built for slate and copper, we will not talk you into a cheaper stand-in.
What the slope and the era tell us
Beacon Hill is three neighborhoods in one. The South Slope holds the aristocratic Federal rowhouses the Mount Vernon Proprietors laid out, with their fanlights, wrought iron, and the famous panes of purple glass. The North Slope grew up denser and more modest. The Flat of the Hill, west of Charles Street, was built on filled land. Woven through all of it are the later Second Empire houses whose slate mansards are the one part of the roof you actually see from the street.
Roofing under the Beacon Hill Architectural Commission
The Beacon Hill Architectural Commission has reviewed exterior changes on the Hill since 1955, and it meets the third Thursday of each month. Anything visible from a public way falls under it, and that includes the roof: a reslated mansard, a new dormer or skylight, a copper gutter, or a change of material or color. It is widely regarded as one of the toughest historic districts in the United States. We have taken roofs through commission review before, and we build the slate and copper samples and the drawings it expects so the meeting moves rather than stalls. If you are not sure how the rules apply to your address, the City of Boston publishes the Beacon Hill district guidelines online, or we will read the parcel for you. Our note on historic roof permits around Boston covers what that review asks for.
- 2005 Family-run since
- 4.9★ 23 Google reviews
- 75–150 yr Slate roof lifespan
- In-house Crew — never subcontracted
Licensed & Insured · MA Construction Supervisor · MHIC Registered
Hidden gutters, party walls, and slate mansards
The hard part of a Beacon Hill roof is not the slate you can see. It is the water that has to leave a house wedged into a long attached row. The Federal rowhouses drain through hidden gutters behind the parapet and copper downspouts buried in the party walls, and when those fail the leak shows up two floors down or on a wall shared with the neighbor. On the mansards, the steep slate face catches ice and needs its copper flashing kept tight. We do this work on brick rowhouses across Boston, including a slate roof and copper gutter rebuild in Back Bay, and we reslate mansards like the Second Empire Victorian we restored in Davis Square.