Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House is on the Market

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

A week after we saw it on the Modern House Day tour, Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, on Oeneoke Ridge Road in New Canaan, is on the market. I had predicted it would list for $5 million; the actual listing is for $4.9 million. Details here.

Stone designed another very similar house -- complete with pyramids on the roof -- in North Salem, where Route 121 and June Road diverge. I was in it once years ago, as a reporter, when it was the location of an auction that partly benefited a local arts center, and then I stopped by again within the last 18 months, I think, when it was on the market and there was an open house for real estate brokers. He built it for Carlo Paterno, the grandfather of a friend of ours, and if you go to this Google search and click on the first result, you can see it on page 10 of a pdf of a 1962 issue of Architectural Record. It contains an interesting quote from Stone about development patterns, the kind of sentiment that would make smart growth proponents and New Urbanists happy. And remember, it's from 1962:

We must give up the idea that we are English country squires and plan our houses compactly. Our countryside is being used up by these millions of little boxes. We should be inspired by the Mediterranean countries which have, as you know, compact villages, towns with houses built wall to wall and privacy obtained by cloistered walled gardens, courtyards and atriums. And in planning compactly this way we will save the open countryside.

Sustainability and Modern Houses

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

Being interested in the stuff I’m interested in, one of the ideas that kept popping into my mind on Saturday, at the New Canaan Historical Society’s Modern House Day, was how energy-efficient a classic modern house can be – how sustainable, to use to current buzzword.

I think it was Fred Noyes, Eliot Noyes’s son and a speaker at the morning’s symposium, who reminded people that when the modern houses were built, heating oil was about 16 cents a gallon, so I’m sure the houses from that era could use double- or triple-pane windows now. But even so, the houses seem as if they were easy to keep warm in winter and cool in summer.

The houses are small to begin with, although not so small that a normal family shouldn’t be able to live there (the woman who lives now in the Rogers House, which John Black Lee designed, said she happily raised four children there). They were built to take in the winter sun, so they get heat passively to supplement their oil heat. Many were built with large eaves or overhangs, to provide shade from the summer sun (however central air conditioning is an issue with a lot of these houses – everyone wants it now and none of the modern houses were built with it). Some of the houses have radiant heat in the floors, which tends to stay warm longer.

The radiant heat was on in the Noyes House, and there was a small fire in the fireplace. The early afternoon was cold and blustery on Saturday, and when we got into the main room, no one wanted to leave. The Noyes House is almost never open – I remember reading that the Noyeses considered it too much trouble to tidy up for modern house aficionados. Gina said she had been there to visit the family when she was a child but had no clear memory of it, and I’ve been driving past it for years, peering through the woods to try to get a good look at it, stupidly not realizing that, as Fred Noyes said during the symposium, his father designed it so it would blend into the woods.

It turned out to be as beautiful and comfortable as any we had been in, not a perfect jewel, like other houses, but a simple, modern house for living in. The house is famously divided into two boxes, both 25 by 50, or so I overheard, although, thinking back, those dimensions seem too small. The front and back wall of each box is made of native stone. They connect each box and form a courtyard that has sliding barn doors on each side. In one box is the living and eating area, in the other, the bedrooms – like a traditional downstairs and upstairs, except horizontal. The only bathrooms are in the bedroom box, which meant every trip to the toilet from the living room or kitchen necessitated a walk through the courtyard. Fred Noyes said that having grown up there, it was no big deal at all.

We went into the living area side first. Four black leather chairs and a leather couch formed a three-sides of a square, the fourth side being the fireplace. Behind the fireplace was a small study, with bookshelves built into the back of the fireplace. The kitchen was opposite the fireplace, small, with a window to look out into the living room. The side walls, of course, were glass, with a view into the woods and the courtyard. The courtyard itself was smaller than it looks in photos, and the black Calder sculpture, tucked into one of the corners, was bigger than I’d imagined. The bedroom building was simple and functional, the master bedroom large and warm, with a wood-burning stove. Out back there was a watercolor studio – the docent told us that Noyes was an accomplished watercolorist. Gina and I and our friend Alan Peterman, who is building his own modern house in Pound Ridge, agreed – we’d move in tomorrow if we could.

The other two houses that seemed to meet the 21st century need for sustainability were the Rogers House, which I wrote a bit about yesterday, and the Breuer House. The plan for the tour was to visit the Breuer House and walk around the outside. But when each tour bus arrived in turn, the owner – a very pleasant and gracious woman – invited everyone in. Breuer built this house for himself, in the late 1940s, and it’s another one that we’ve been driving by and peering at for years, in this case because Gina’s parents and her aunt and uncle (the folks who owned our house before us) rented it from Breuer for two summers, 1949 and ’50, I believe. Like the Noyes House and the Rogers House, it was built to an appropriate, human scale, not too big, not grandiose (although it has been expanded and its cantilevers buttressed since Breuer built it).

The other house that knocked us out, for different reasons, was the Celanese House. It is in the final stage of being renovated – landscapers rolled out the new sod just days before the tour – and was the only house on the tour that was unfurnished, so the experience of being in it was pure. Fred Bernstein wrote about it not long ago in the Times, and you can get the details about its renovation here. Suffice it to say that it was a warm, beautifully-lit, cozy gem, and being in it was like being inside a pearl. It’s about to go on the market. The nice William Raveis agent who we chatted with claimed not to know what the price would be. My guess is $5 million, but who knows. Call the Raveis agency if you’re interested. If I had $5 million and wanted to live in New Canaan, I would be.

Three Modernists at Modern House Day

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

One of the great things about the Modern House Day tour and symposium, which was held Saturday in New Canaan, is that you get to hear and meet some of the real giants of modern architecture and design. This year John Johansen, one of the Harvard Five architects, and Jens Risom, the furniture designer, spoke at the symposium, and John Black Lee, served as the host at one of the houses on the tour, the Rogers House, which he designed.

Johansen is 91, slightly built but apparently still agile (he climbed over a folding chair in the auditorium to get from one row to the next) and has a thinning mane of white hair, swept back, and a well-trimmed white beard. Risom is also 91. Like Johansen he’s not tall but he is sturdily built, looks great in a suit, has a full head of white hair, and appears to be still vigorous. Lee is younger, though no spring chicken, and is less natty than Risom, preferring boat shoes (sometimes without socks), khakis and a fleece vest to a suit. All three basked happily in the attention and the lionization.



I saw them at a cocktail party that was part of the festivities and talked for a minute with Risom, who is an old friend of my wife’s family, and Lee, who oversaw the construction of my wife’s parents house, back in 1949 and ’50 (although he did not design it). I didn’t talk to Johansen, mainly because I had no connection and couldn’t think of what to ask him but also because he was continually surrounded. But he and Risom had interesting things to say at the symposium, and Lee was equally interesting in impromptu remarks he made at the Rogers house.

Here’s a summary – it’s almost all direct quotes but my note-taking was harried so to be safe I’ll leave off the quotation marks except where I’m sure.

John Johansen: He said that Gropius was the Apollonian figure in modern architecture and he learned a great deal from him at Harvard (he also married Gropius’s daughter, Ati). But from Marcel Breuer (who was also at Harvard and was one the Harvard Five) he learned more not in school but at drinking parties in New Canaan, so if Gropius was the Apollonian figure, Breuer was the Bacchalonian figure.

When Johansen came of age, the influence of the Ecole des Beaux Arts was fading away; it was no longer able to deal with the problems of the modern world and no longer had the spirit to stir men’s blood. By contrast, at Harvard there was a fierce and joyous spirit, where they taught principles but not styles – a new way of thinking, a new way of feeling, a new way of design, and a new way of living.

In New Canaan they imparted this to a few of their first clients. Eliot Noyes was first. He represented the box, Johansen said – in other words, his house designs were based on a box-like structure. Breuer learned from Breuer, Philip Johnson learned from Mies van der Rohe, Landis Gores learned from Frank Lloyd Wright – (“His beautiful, beautiful house of his own still stands” in New Canaan, he said of Gores, who with Johnson and Noyes made up the remainder of the Harvard Five). Johansen said he found his way out of the box through symbolism, biomorphism, historicism and high technology.

He said that during the early modern house days, many of the houses weren’t finished and some leaked. He showed a slide of his own house, furnished with classic modern furniture, including a Corbusier chair, and then said that the architects would open up their houses for tours and exchange furniture with each other, to “give interior respectability.” He showed a slide of one of his structures and said that when two people passing by stopped to look at it, one asked, “What is it?” The other said, “I don’t know but let’s buy it and turn it into a house.”

Johansen said he built 27 houses, 8 of which have been lost, as he put it. How does he deal with having his creations torn down (by Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas, in one egregious example)?

“The reward is in the doing, the product doesn’t matter, I won already for having created it. And finally, a more forceful reference – forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Jens Risom: There was no avoiding the obvious fact that the mid-century modernists are now old. Referring to Johansen by his nickname, Risom said, “I’m one month older than Jo. We meet each other and say, ‘My God! Are you still alive?’ “

He said he tries to create furniture that is pleasant to look at, not overwhelming, makes sense, and is comfortable or stores the things it was made to store. He likes to use wood because he considers it a bridge between the house and the human beings who live in the house.

He said, “In this town it’s amazing to me how so few people consider working with an architect. Respect for architecture is not good enough, respect for good design is not good enough. What we’ve seen around here as speculative, commercial housing is pretty bad.”

People tell him that modern furniture won’t go with their old, beautiful things. “I tell them, ‘First of all, your furniture is not old; second of all, it’s not beautiful.’ “

John Black Lee: Standing outside the Rogers house (which Lee designed for Ted Rogers, the producer of the Today Show), he talked about the symmetrical design and the glass walls in front and back, and then recalled a New Year’s Eve party there during a snowstorm, where everybody got plastered, as he put it, and went out and made snow angels.

We went inside and Lee asked us to come into the living room, “Sit down, get a sense of the scale and the relationship to outside.” He talked about the spirit of the house, how it serves the people who live in it. We looked out the south window across a lawn that rolled away to a split rail fence connecting two groves of trees, which were bending in the wind. He said, “Architects tell people how to live. I’m much more gratified when people come into a house, live in it, and show me how to live.”
He talked about Mies Ven der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Illinois. Edith Farnsworth was an interior decorator who went to college with Lee’s mother and who, as he put it, had the hots for Mies. That led him into a discussion of great houses. In his opinion, he said, there are five great houses in the United States: Fallingwater, the Glass House, a house Lee himself designed and Toshiko Mori updated, on Chichester Road in New Canaan (he called it Lee House number 2), Johnson’s Boissonnas house, and the Kaufman house, which Neutra designed, in Palm Springs.

I have other impressions and observations from Modern House Day that maybe I'll get to later. The event was a fund-raiser for the New Canaan Historical Society, which organized it with a lot of help from a group of volunteers. The William Raveis real estate agency was a prime sponsor, and their brokers served as docents at some of the houses (and made sure everyone knew that Johnson's Alice Ball House is again threatened with destruction -- it would be the first Johnson house to be torn down -- and is on the market, and that Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, which was on the tour and has been spectacularly restored, will soon be on the market).

The Modern House Day logo was designed by Gina Federico Graphic Design.

Saturday's Modern House Day is Almost Sold Out

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

At a last-minute organizing session last night for Saturday’s Modern House Day in New Canaan, I learned that 179 tickets have been sold and only five or so slots remain. I also learned that at each of the five houses we’ll be touring, there will be an architect (for one of the houses, the architect who actually designed it, John Black Lee, will be the house architect) and a docent, and each bus will have an architect and a docent. Gina is the docent for one of the buses, and I’m the architect.

Maybe I should write it “architect” – I’m of course not an architect, although the organizers of the event don’t seem particularly concerned about that. Luckily for the people who will be on my bus, the bus architects were told not to talk too much about each house before we get to it; the house architects will handle all that.

If you’re interested in one of the last tickets, click here for information.

Modern House Tour in New Canaan

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

Tickets are on sale for the next Modern House Day tour and symposium in New Canaan, on Saturday, November 3. Some of the houses on the tour have changed from the original plans but there’s good stuff nonetheless. Tickets are $250 each. There's more info on the New Canaan Historical Society's website (the History Society and its volunteers are the organizers of the event).



I've been helping to write the brochure for the event (my wife's firm, Gina Federico Graphic Design, is doing the design, pro bono), and here's some of what I've learned:

The oldest house on the tour was built in 1939 by two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin fellows, John Howe and Edgar Tafel. I always think of our own house, also built in 1939, as being the oldest Modern around here, but apparently it has a contemporary. (October 31 correction: This is wrong; the house was built in 1982.)

Edward Durell Stone’s Celanese House, where renovations are just finishing up, is on the tour. The Times had a story about it, and the people who are renovating it, over the weekend, here.

The house that Eliot Noyes built and lived in with his family will also be on the tour. As I understand it, it's been decades since the public has been able to tour the house. But it’s been written about a lot recently and the family is obviously interested in helping people remember Noyes’s achievements. His son, Frederick, will be one of the speakers at the day’s symposium.

There’s also a house designed by John Black Lee, who will be there to answer questions; and one attributed to Victor Christ-Janer.

The house that Breuer built for himself, in the late 1940s, will be on the tour, although only for an exterior view. My wife’s parents and aunt and uncle rented the house from Breuer in ‘49; her parents lived there while their own Modern was being finished and her aunt and uncle lived there while buying the house we live in now. We have some old glass-plate photos of it but I don’t know how to get them digitized.

The Gores Pavilion, in Irwin Park, will also be on the tour, as a drive-by.

The day starts with a symposium. Among the speakers are Jens Risom, the furniture designer, and John Johansen, the only surviving member of New Canaan''s "Harvard Five" architects. Johansen, by the way, is married to Walter Gropius's daughter, which is an interesting connection to the birth of the Bauhaus and Modern architecture.

Modern House Day 2007 in New Canaan

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

Thursday, May 17, 2007
New Canaan's Moderns and the National Register of Historic Places
The people who want to put New Canaan's modern houses on the National Register of Historic Places (which I wrote about last Friday) say they've already been in touch with more than 80 homeowners and that, so far, the reaction has been good.

The project seems to be a collaboration among the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, the New Canaan Historical Society and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (which owns and operates Philip Johnson's Glass House). And there's an advisory committee of John Johansen, John Black Lee, Toshiko Mori, Theo Prudon and Robert A.M. Stern. (Johansen is the only survivor of the Harvard Five architects (Johnson, Breuer, Noyes and Gores were the others); John Black Lee designed a number of New Canaan moderns, including one of my favorites, on Chichester Road, which Toshiko Mori, the chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, re-did a few years back (Lee also supervised the construction of my in-laws' house in Pound Ridge, although he didn't design it); Stern is the dean of the Yale School of Architecture; I don't know who Theo Prudon is, although I probably should).

Here's the idea behind the project, from the Glass House website:

The knowledge gained from this project is not only intended to shed light on the individual importance of this community in its greater influence outside of CT, but it is intended to inform other Modernist communities across the United States that wish to embark on similar studies. The recognition of mid-century Modern homes and their role as an asset within real estate investment is growing, however the formal recognition of this architecture is still necessary for a proactive approach to preservation. The thematic National Register Nomination of a number of these homes will serve this purpose.

I haven't heard about any modern houses in New Canaan being razed lately, which not long ago was a huge problem. I'm sure there are still threats, and I think the town government itself still takes a hands-off attitude about it, as if tear-downs were merely a function of the free market when in fact, with all the zoning regulations in New Canaan and elsewhere, real estate and development are almost completely under government control and tear-downs could be regulated too if the town thought it important enough.

Listing on the National Register in itself won't prevent tear downs. But it will be one more way to put encourage owners to preserve modern houses and, with any luck, discourage the spec developers from buying them and tearing them down.

Which prompts this thought: while the list is being prepared for the National Register, someone out to come up with a complementary list of developers who buy and tear down modern houses. Maybe they'd be less willing to do it if we make their names known (like this guy, in Westport).

Friday, May 11, 2007
New Canaan's Moderns Might Be Nominated for the National Register of Historic Places
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is apparently planning to survey New Canaan's modern houses (the trust says there are more than 90 extant) and prepare a "thematic" nomination for the National Register of Historic Places. That information, and nothing else unfortunately, is available on the Philip Johnson Glass House website, here.

Monday, May 7, 2007
Modern House Day
We're looking forward to the 2007 Modern House Day in New Canaan, which is scheduled for Saturday, November 3.

The tour will include a house by Marcel Breuer, one by Elliot Noyes, and one by Philip Johnson; Edward Durrell Stone's Celanese House, which is being renovated; and one or two others.

It will also include lunch (probably outside, under a tent) at Landis Gores's Pavilion House, in Irwin Park, which is likely to be used as an exhibition space for mid-century modern furniture.

The event is a fundraiser for the New Canaan Historical Society, which has worked hard to open the eyes of New Canaan residents to the importance of the town's modern architecture. I'm not sure of the price yet, although it's not cheap. But they sell only 250 tickets, and the two previous events -- in 2001 and 2004 -- were sold out. They were also enlightening and great fun.



My wife's firm, Gina Federico Graphic Design, is volunteering to design all the printed material, including the ticket/brochure (which I'll write).

In the meantime, there's a tour of Usonia, the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired community in Mount Pleasant, New York, coming up on Saturday, and an exhibition about Usonia at The Studio, a gallery in Armonk, here.