EASTHAM — The owners of a property overlooking Boat Meadow marsh have agreed to compromise with their neighbors and downsize a plan to replace an existing cottage with a large house and a garage that includes an apartment above.

While the project’s original components essentially remain, several changes were made to reduce their size and soften the appearance of the building’s mass.

On April 6, the zoning board of appeals initially voted to uphold the planning board’s previous site plan approval for the project but also to require that the first and second stories of the house be reduced by 10 percent.

Attorney Ben Zehnder, representing the property’s new owners, John Sheehan and Sara Zobel, complained that would “kill” the project. The zoning board then rescinded its vote and gave the two sides a month to see if they could settle their differences. The agreement reduces the main floors of the house by 9.5 percent.

Neighbor Christopher Szwedo, who had opposed the project, said the house will still be large but not quite as imposing as it would have been. “The things that made it over the top were taken out,” Szwedo said.

The compromise most likely kept the dispute out of court.

“I was ready to take it to the next level,” Szwedo said after the agreement was reached. “I think Ben saw the way out of it for his clients was to negotiate.”

Despite considerable pushback from abutters, Sheehan and Zobel had secured site plan approval from the planning board in December for a project that included about 5,000 square feet of living space at 715 Bridge Road.

Szwedo and his partner, Andrea Hanson, who live at 15 Bayview Road directly behind the proposed house, filed an appeal of the site-plan approval. At the April 6 ZBA hearing, they argued the planning board had made no attempt to shape the project so that it would fit into the neighborhood, where houses range from 2,000 to 3,000 square feet.

The planning board had shown a “predisposition” to allow large houses, said Hanson and Szwedo, who played a clip from the planning board’s site plan discussion of the project in late fall to make their point. In it, Chair Daniel Coppelman said people today want taller ceilings and bigger windows. “You’re not going to keep 1920s cottages in a town forever,” he said.

After a negotiating session at Zehnder’s office, new plans were drawn up incorporating several adjustments to reduce the scale of the project. It was then sent to the neighbors for review.

The neighbors found them acceptable, Zehnder told the ZBA on May 4.

The new design reduced the two main floors by 315 square feet, or 9.5 percent, and the finished basement and studio above the garage by 304 square feet. Other changes include larger overhangs on the water side of the house to reduce its visual scale; lowering the roof height in the center by 1½ feet to break up the building volume; reducing size of the entry porch; and eliminating some windows and making others smaller.

The zoning board voted to approve the changes and attach them to the project’s site plan approval.

At that same meeting, Szwedo and Hanson said they wanted to make their dissatisfaction with the planning board’s review process part of the record. “We feel this compromise could have happened last year, and that a great deal of time was wasted because abutters and neighbors weren’t listened to at the outset,” Hanson said. “The planning board made us feel like we were invisible and not heard.”

“It’s time to move forward,” said ZBA chair Joanne Verlinden.

Regarding the planning board’s process, Coppelman told the Independent that his board had reviewed the application thoroughly. It concluded, he said, “that, according to the existing Eastham bylaws, it met zoning.”

Town meeting voters on May 6 approved several zoning bylaw changes including one setting site coverage limits and calculating coverage based on the amount of buildable upland on the lot.

Now, even with the planned reductions, the size of this house would exceed the maximum standard for lot coverage, Town Planner Paul Lagg said. But because Sheehan and Zobel’s plans for 715 Bridge Road had already been approved, the new rules do not apply to their case.

Coppelman said the bylaw changes will help his board “eliminate subjective review and get to objective review.”

EASTHAM — Two abutters have appealed the planning board’s site plan approval of a new house that will overlook Boat Meadow marsh. At issue is the proposed house’s size: it is about twice as large as the one it will replace.

The town’s zoning board of appeals will consider the case at an April 6 hearing, the first step in the appeal process.

At issue is the property at 715 Bridge Road. Owners John Sheehan and Sara Zobel of New York City and Mashpee want to tear down the existing house and build a 4,355-square-foot house and 1,321-square-foot garage with an upstairs apartment. The proposal would result in more than 5,000 square feet of living space.

Other homes in the neighborhood range from 2,000 to 3,000 square feet; the existing house, at about 2,000 square feet, fits in that range.

The planning board approved the proposal for the larger house on Dec. 21, with only one member, James Kivlehan, voting in opposition.

Andrea Hanson and Christopher Szwedo, who live at 15 Bayview Road directly behind the target site, filed the appeal of the site plan approval in January. In their letter, the pair argue that the planning board made no attempt “to shape this large project to that of the neighborhood.

“The majority of the members, most notably the chairman, in his own words, view large home construction as an ‘inevitability,’ ” Hanson and Szwedo wrote.

Town Planner Paul Lagg explained the appeal process in Eastham, which allows for reconsideration of the original proposal by the zoning board.

“There is going to be a discussion that really gets into negotiations: what are the issues and can they be mitigated,” Lagg said.

The goal of site plan review, according to Lagg, is ultimately to get a project approved. “The board can shape the project with conditions,” he said. “It’s the same rules and the same process for the zoning board, so this is basically a do-over.”

Whatever the zoning board decides regarding the appeal, that decision, too, can be appealed by either side. Any further appeals of this case would have to be filed in the state court system.

During the planning board’s December deliberations, Vice Chair Davis Hobbs pointed out that the site plan met the town’s setback requirements. The owner therefore has the right to build it, he said.

Member Peter Weston commented that the price of land on Cape Cod has skyrocketed. “You can’t expect people to pay half a million dollars for land and build a $30,000 house,” Weston said.

While considerations do include how well a structure will fit into the neighborhood around it in terms of both size and character, Eastham currently does not have a house size limit to guide the board.

Voters at the May 6 annual town meeting will consider a proposal to link allowable house size to lot size as well as to the design, height, and building scale of other structures in the neighborhood. The aim is to take the subjectivity out of the decision.

Because it is already on the table now, however, the proposal for 715 Bridge Road would not be affected by any changes voters might approve at the upcoming town meeting.

One adjustment to zoning that will be on the warrant has to do with how the town calculates the percentage of lot coverage. Currently, it is calculated on the total acreage of the lot. One proposal, Lagg said, would instead base the calculation on the buildable upland of the lot.

In the case of 715 Bridge Road, the proposed coverage of the full 64,000-square-foot lot would be 8.87 percent. But the upland area on the lot is only 25,000 square feet, so lot coverage calculated using upland area only would put its lot coverage at more than 22 percent.

The proposed provisions would also eliminate basement areas from the living space calculation, Lagg said, so for that reason he was unsure how the changes might have played out in the 715 Bridge Road proposal.