A Sign From Yesteryear to Begin the New Year

Interesting article in the local Patch for Lexington (quoting John Tse) about a recent discovery of an old sign for sales of Carl Koch's Techbuilt houses in Middle Ridge/Turning Mill, as described in a recent post of mine.

Lincoln Deck House Listing

We are very happy to be back listing another modern house in Lincoln, if for no other reason than to have all our friends from Friends of Modern Architecture/Lincoln (FoMA) come and visit us.

Just up the road from Valley Pond, 2 Old Conant Road is a 1973 Deck House beautifully sited on a wooded lot not far from the juncture of Conant and Old Conant Roads. With the soaring architectural lines and abundant natural light associated with Deck House, the open floor plan flows room living to dining room to kitchen. Cozy up to the fireplace with a hot toddy and enjoy views of pines from each window. Five bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a family/rec room on walk-out lower level. Custom cabinetry; hardwood floors; skylights; gas cooktop; huge garage/barn; and an expansive deck (naturally!) However, as photographer and Deck House resident, David Travers points out, "the name derives from the tongue-and-groove cedar or Douglas Fir decking used on the ceiling/roof/floor construction that basically ties the house together, not really from the almost ever-present outdoor decks."






(Browser allowing, click any image to enlarge)

(See below for more information on Deck House and the neighborhood)

Offered for $769,000. Open house 12:30-2 pm Sunday, November 14. Contact us at Billjanovitz@hammondre.com for more information.

5 bedrooms

2 full baths

2583 square feet of living area

Heated by oil-fired hot water baseboard heat.

Private water and septic (Title V in hand)

80,131 s.f. lot (1.83 acres)

Gas cooktop (propane fired)

Wall ovens

Laundry room

Family room in walk-out lower level

Full deck off of the main living area, accessed by sliders

Large garage/barn with additional storage.

Recent updates: newer roof and skylights; updates air conditioning and heating.








The Neighborhood

There are two main approaches to 2 Old Conant. One is to go pass the classic Dairy Joy stand with unparalleled ice cream and fried foods (be still -- if not healthy -- my heart!) on Rt. 117 and then to take a right up Conant, passing by the pastoral Valley Pond on the left. The other option is to come in from the north, via Trapelo Road, up Laurel Hill to Conant, passing through farms, meadows, and other architectural gems along the way. There, at the juncture of Conant and Old Conant Roads, set back along a long private driveway, is 2 Old Conant.

The house is surrounded by other Deck Houses and modernist homes, within sight of the stunning International-style modernist house that Earl Flansburgh built for himself and his family. Those alt-rocker friends of mine might recognize the surname shared with Earl's son, John, of They Might Be Giants.


About Deckhouse

Acton, MA-based Deck House was recently resuscitated by local businessman, Tom Trudeau, after the recent recession brought the 60+ year-old company to bankruptcy. The roots grew -- pardon the pun - out of Acorn Structures, a trailblazing company founded in 1947 by John Bremis and the legendary Techbuilt and Snake Hill architect Carl Koch (see info here). Acorn developed a very different sort of aesthetic over the intervening decades

Meanwhile, Deck was founded in the 1950s by William Berke, a Gropius disciple out of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Those new to this site can click many of the links to the right to read about Gropius, TAC, his firm, and the various residential projects in Boston's western suburbs. Deck House remained more mid-century modernist in look and principle than Acorn.

To further quote the Boston Globe:

The two companies merged in 1995, and in 2003 Gilrane bought the merged entity through a holding company, renaming it Empyrean. The company estimates over the years it has built more than 20,000 homes, as far away as Israel and South Korea.

Empyrean began its partnership with Dwell magazine in 2005, and the homes they designed and built were more modernist than the other two lines - boxy, more angular, and visually more reminiscent of the kind of homes Gropius's contemporaries and his students turned out in the last century.


But since this article appeared. the company has risen from the ashes and has a third new line, the striking NextHouse.

For a more updated version of the classic Deck House, look no further than my most previous post at a custom-built Deck in Groton, MA.


A note on the price, we feel that this is an exceptional value, particularly given the location within Lincoln. Our last listing in Lincoln, the Stubbins-designed house on Old County Road (not to be confused with this one on Old Conant), had multiple offers immediately and is slated to close for a price considerably over the asking price of $799,000.

19 Demar Rd. in Lexington -- Techbuilt Classic

Designed by Carl Koch, the "Grandfather of Prefab" (Progressive Architecture, 1994), this Techbuilt classic, a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath 2615 s.f. home is a fine example of the pioneering modernism that Koch applied to mid-century homebuilding as returning GIs and a surge in Boston-area technology firms created more demand for housing young families. Bill Janovitz and John Tse are thrilled to offer this property for the listing price of $639,000. It will have an open house 1-3 on Sunday 10/17/20. Please contact me with any questions or to set up a private showing: bjanovitz@hammondre.com.


The House

Set on a wooded 3/4 acre, the siting takes full advantage of the natural beauty of Lexington's Middle Ridge/Turning Mill neighborhood. Vast expanses of glass open up the living area in the rear to meet the large, level, and private backyard. The open floor plan offers a natural flow. From the foyer (an addition consistent with the modernist aesthetic), one is drawn down the stairs of the split entry toward the views from the windows in the main living area. You will be forgiven for being distracted by the view and failing to immediately notice the newly refinished hardwood floors. The flexible first floor layout consists of a dining area, an airy, open main area, and a cozy nook formed in part by the fireplace and exposed chimney. It is easy for one to picture him or herself curled up with a book, perhaps a rare edition of Koch's own At Home with Tomorrow. **







Adjacent to the main living area is a room currently used as a 24X25 family room and spa, also an addition to the original structure. A hot tub is in one corner. One could easily see this room as an office large enough to house a home business, a home gym, a playroom, or as it is currently used. Sliders open up the back wall to a patio.




Flanking the living area in the other direction is a huge (20X16) eat-in kitchen with an island. From the walls of windows, watch family, pets, and/or wild turkeys gamboling (as the "wild" variety of turkeys are wont to do) in the backyard while you prepare dinner or wash the dishes at the sink (no need to actually wash, though; of course there is a dishwasher.)




A large half bathroom and laundry room complete the main living area.

Back up through the foyer, a few steps lead you to the main hallway, which in turn opens to three bedrooms and a full bath. A second full bath is included en suite for the master bedroom. All bedrooms feature the cathedral ceilings afforded by the post-and-beam construction. And one of the bedrooms opens up via sliders to use the top of the family room as a deck of sorts. In fact, the seller informs us that the construction of the below structure was designed to support a future deck (as with all such features, a buyer would be responsible for performing his/her own due diligence to verify).





The house had a new roof put on in 2009. There is a two-car garage with plenty of storage. But if you are a pack rat and still can't find enough room for your "I'll get to it someday" restoration project of broken Eames chairs, or your collections of moldy Dwell magazines, there is an additional storage shed.

(click any image to enlarge, if your browser allows)







The Neighborhood

Most people in Lexington know the area as Turning Mill, but it started out being referred to as Middle Ridge. Though it is now a large area of eight or nine streets, it started down here around Demar, with Techbuilt houses designed by Carl Koch, before growing further north and west and incorporating other modern designs, most notably, the Peacock Farm-style house plan designed by Dan Compton and Walter Pierce, who founded Lexington's Peacock Farm neighborhood on the other side of town. There have also been some Deck Houses built. The expanded part of the area is now referred to as "Upper Turning Mill."

Residents love the area due to its proximity to Estabrook Elementary school (adjacent) and because it offers membership in the Paint Rock swimming pool. It also borders the vast Paint Mine conservation area, with beautiful walking trails. The Lexpress bus runs through. And a quick zip takes you down backroads to Whole Foods, Staples, Super Stop & Shop, Marshalls, and so on in Bedford, or back the other way into the center of Lexington. And it is not far from Route 128.


The Architect


There is an understandable reluctance on the part of everyman to
build his counsel of nuts, bolts, and chromium. The industrial
revolution will help us realize our dreams if we can handle it, but we
haven't handled it too well so far. Although it is pathetic to think
we can escape the pressure of competitive business, the battle of
home-office transportation, and a compulsion to drive ourselves too
far, too fast, too much, by escaping into fantasy in the shape of an
eighteenth-century farmhouse, it is understandable that we try.
______

In our general progression of skills, building somehow lags far behind. Not 50 years behind, perhaps -- but not much less, at that. It goes still by hammer and handsaw -- agonizingly slow, inefficient, and more wasteful of money and people than we can any longer afford. The greatest irony of all is that it is so set about by habit, prejudice, false enthusiasm, and obsolete local constrictions that in a land of free enterprise the look of our urban landscapes is as comfortless, imitative, and repetitive, often, as any dictator could wish.

Carl Koch, preface to At Home With Tomorrow, 1958

Middle Ridge was originally "conceived and designed in 1955 by architect Koch as a neighborhood of Techbuilt homes." Koch had already had successfully designed the first modernist development in the Boston area, Belmont's Snake Hill (1941), Concord's first housing development, Conantum (1951), Weston's Kendal Common (1950).*

Koch came to the region when he attended Harvard School of Design, during "the confusing period between Beaux-Arts Eclectic and all-out Modern."*** It was a period (circa 1937) that overlapped with Gropius' time at the school, but for the most part, it seems Koch regarded his "contemporaries" the school as "leaderless or rudderless." More significant in the development of his own professional philosophy and style was a six-month tenure he spent in Sweden with Sven Markelius (1940-41), "which left him with an enduring admiration for the Scandinavian approach to life, democracy, and architecture."*** Certainly one can easily observe the themes of what is typically regarded as the Scandinavian aesthetic -- simple, clean, and functional design.

The eight-house neighborhood of Snake Hill, it seems, was an experiment in creating inexpensive housing for his own family. It is set on winding road high on a hillside off of Route 60 in Belmont.




A lovely Ezra Stoller shot of a Snake Hill home


In 1947, he designed the Acorn House (later merged with Deck House). His aim was to create well-designed and stylish housing for a good value (i.e. inexpensively) for middle classes by producing a modular construction system, manufactured in a factory controlled environment, which could be transported to a building site and assembled in a few days. However, the Acorn house was met with "resistance from local governments" and building code problems. **** More on Acorn history, by Lloyd Alter here.

(By the way, it seems Mr Alter's piece on the demise of Acorn/Deck/Empyrean (sourced liberally from the Boston Globe article linked at bottom) might have been, well not premature, but new life has been given to the first two brands, with a newly resuscitated Deck/Acorn.)

Far more successful were the Techbuilt houses, which, while certainly progressive architecturally, were more in line with prevailing trends and tastes. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, over 3000 of these houses were built, utilizing six different models. At least three were built in New Canaan, Ct., that other hotbed of Northeastern modernism, but it seems as though Lexington and Concord have the highest concentration and the highest amount of Techbuilt homes still preserved today.



Sources include:

*Lexington's Historic Survey of neighborhoods and housing stock

**Modernism 101

***McCallum, Ian (1959), Architecture U. S. A., New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp., pp. 170–174 via Hathi Trust

****PreservationNation.org


Treehugger

Boston Globe, "Prefab Pioneer Folds" Ted Seifer, December 24 2008

Snake Hill + "Hipsters in the Woods" -- A great piece by David Fixler

I just stumbled across this piece by David Fixler, President of the New Englad chapter of DOCOMOMO. Years ago, I read a similar piece by Mr. Fixler in Architecture Boston.


Massachusetts is home to the first (and only prewar) Modern house neighborhoods in this country, of which the earliest and one of the most significant is Snake Hill in Belmont, developed by architect Carl Koch. Progressive Architecture noted in a 1945 article on the expansion of Snake Hill that the five original 1940 Snake Hill houses were “one of the best known and most significant groups of contemporary houses in the world,” by virtue of their planning and architecture, and their success in creating a strong sense of community on what had previously been considered an unbuildable rocky hillside. Snake Hill was as innovative technically as it was in social terms; Koch experimented with new materials and construction techniques that enabled the houses to be built cheaply and quickly, without sacrificing aesthetics or the quality of the interior space. The steep road accessing Snake Hill was even fitted with radiant hot-water pipes to melt snow and ice. The enduring coherence of Snake Hill’s identity is underscored by the relative obscurity of a contemporary development, under-taken by architect Gunnar Peterson in 1941 in Falmouth. This was unfortunately not conceived as a protected community, and has therefore had a considerable number of its houses replaced with mammoth contemporary structures that have severely compromised the character of the neighborhood.

The western suburbs — arcing out from an intellectual heart in Cambridge through Belmont, Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, and Weston — formed the locus of the Modern neighborhood. Each was a place that attracted progressive intellectuals, most of limited means, in search of space and good schools for growing families. A culture receptive to Modernism had already established itself in this area before the war: the first Modern houses in New England were the 1932 Eleanor Raymond House in Belmont, the 1933 Field House in Weston, and several houses including architect Henry Hoover’s own house, in Lincoln — all prior to the arrival of Walter Gropius in 1938.

Read more of the article here (PDF).

Our New Peacock Farm Listing

We are pleased to present this new listing, coming on the market via MLS on February 24. Contact Bill at 781-856-0992 or bjanovitz@hammondre.com to arrange a showing. Price $748,988.

It is an expanded and updated five-bedroom Peacock Farm house. The original Walter Pierce design of this now-modern-classic style has been expanded in the front, on the side, and in the rear. The kitchen in particular, benefits with the bump-out and feels much larger than most Peacock Farm kitchens. And the front addition adds a foyer. As the viewer steps into the living room, the eye is carried through the open-concept living and dining area, flowing through to the outside via walls of sliding glass doors. The viewer is drawn out to an expansive 30-foot deck overlooking the large level lot.












The house has 2203 square feet of living area on three split levels. There are two full baths and five bedrooms, three of which are on the uppermost floor. If a buyer wanted a large open family room on the lower level, one could open up the two bedrooms on the walk-out, above-grade lower level.

The kitchen has been bumped out with an addition and has Staron (like Corian) counters and a large stainless steel range.

One of the great features of 52 Peacock Farm Rd. is that the original windows have been replaced by Pella insulated windows.

There is a two-car carport designed by Walter Pierce in 1994.

Neighborhood swimming pool.

Floor plans (click for larger):




Original layout of Peacock Farm:



From our web site, Modernmass.com:

One of three important planned modernist developments, “Peacock Farm” was just a stone's throw across Pleasant Street from the swimming pool of Six Moon Hill. This community was founded not by an architect associated with Harvard, as TAC was, but by Walter Pierce, from Harvard’s Cambridge rival, MIT. As Laurie Atwater began her article in Lexington’s Colonial Times newspaper,

The cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times for September 13, 1959 announced: Russians Fire Rocket to the Moon, Expected to Hit Target Today….

Inside the pages, a story from Lexington, Massachusetts: Colony of Contemporary Homes Will Be Repeated Near Boston.

Pierce started his own architecture firm with Danforth Compton after studying at MIT with (amongst others) Carl Koch, a former student of Walter Gropius and a founding father of modern prefab housing in America as the founder of Techbuilt and Acorn Homes (we will recall the House by Mail Craftsman homes from Sears and Roebuck in the early-1900s). Compton and Pierce noticed a "for sale" sign off of Route 2, Peacock Farm Road, a turn off of Watertown Street in Lexington. There was a 45-acre farm filled with wetlands, ledge, and woods. The two architects set out to become the developers of the site, with a plan they referred to as the “Program.” The concept was to build modern, aesthetically progressive homes that would be from a stock design yet looked as if they were custom built for the land.

After initially designing one-floor houses and building a handful of them, Compton suddenly and unexpectedly passed away and Pierce went on to design what is now known as the Peacock Farm House, a modern split-level home that, as Atwater notes in her article, “allowed the home to be ‘of the hill,’ as Frank Lloyd Wright” espoused. The shape of this house style was flexible enough that it could adapt to flat or sloping lots. With some subtle variations, the typical Peacock Farm House had an entrance in the center of the broad side of the structure, a few steps up to a second floor consisting of three bedrooms and a bath or a bath and a half. There is the main floor with a kitchen, dining area and living room with a fireplace and exposed brick chimney. The structure was a basic post-and-beam system with few if any interior load-bearing walls, allowing for great flexibility in the floor plans, and many large windows unobstructed by sashes, mullions, or any unnecessary architectural features. A few steps to a lower level set in various depths of the grading of the site and sometimes a second lower level basement, depending on how much of a slope was present.

The Compton-Pierce team challenged the traditional notion of a house needing to be facing more or less square to the street. Free from this principal, they oriented the homes to be complimentary to the sites, taking advantage of the views and offering the sites the appearance of more space in between the houses. This was also counter to the trends of most modern developments, which seemed to operate from a scorched earth policy, clearing the land and plopping down cookie-cutter houses one after another and then possibly going back to plant saplings after the fact.

Many of these homes have been renovated and expanded over the years, much like those on Moon Hill and Five Fields. They seem very adaptable to such modifications. And most homeowners in these communities have adhered to the mild covenants that the original developers put into place to keep the communities aesthetically consistent. Note that I did not write, “homogeneous.” Modern, that is to say “present day” builders and developers should take note that a mish-mash neighborhood of new neo-colonial-Georgian-Victorians gussied up with various frills and flourishes is a less effective way of distinguishing a group of new houses from each other than the simple approach demonstrated by these forward-looking architects of the mid-century, using one or two plans and adapting them to the contours of the existing land with as little disturbance as possible to the existing conditions of the environment. Though these houses were not, as originally built, the most energy efficient by today’s standards, due to outdated heating systems, relatively little insulation, and large single-paned windows, they are easily retrofitted with updates for all of those components. They were, however, “green” from the get-go in their approach to land use, both in the conserving of the existing flora, with few having traditional lawns even today, minimizing impermeable surfaces (gravel driveways, e.g.), and reasonable lot sizes with larger amounts of common land for all to enjoy.

Which brings us to the socio-political philosophy that underlies these communities’ origins. Not only were these houses extraordinarily “new” in their styles, standing in stark contrast to the traditional New England vernacular via a contemporary European artistic aesthetic, but the founders of these developments also brought an egalitarian approach with attention to developing a community ideal that contrasted the largely politically and socially conservative post-war suburbs. Levittown was about conforming to the new neat and largely homogeneous suburban idea of the American Dream, trimmed lawns hemmed in by squared fences. These Lexington modernist developments tended to encourage responsibility and cooperation in the neighborhood as a whole, with partnerships in the non-profit corporations formed to watch over the common areas and the upholding of the benign covenants.

The layout of the communities has allowed for a natural sort of privacy yet a community spirit was fostered and has continued to flourish in all of them. Peacock Farm celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. (See more about this and other modernist communities at www.Modernmass.com)