The blog and 10 Moon Hill article in Boston Magazine

Nice to be able to contribute to a spotlight in Boston Magazine on Moon Hill and our listing at 10 Moon Hill, which is currently under agreement, by the way.

Click to see article:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/real_estate_modern_history/

42 Peacock Farm Road -- New Listing

John Tse and I have listed another Peacock Farm classic. (SOLD, closing end of June 2010)

Sunny mid-century modern classic: 5 bedroom, 3 full bath original Peacock Farm house designed by noted architects Walter Pierce and Danforth Compton, updated & well-maintained by the original owners, now offered for the first time in over 50 years. Nestled gently into the 1/3-acre lot with Zen-like moss gardens and bluestone patio. This progressive style won the AIA/Homes for Better Living award in 1957. Recent updates include 1990s kitchen; 2000s boiler/H2O heater; 2-pane windows and storms; and bathrooms. Hardwood floors. Master w/full en suite bath. Corner lot w/cul-de-sac street.



Some features and Notes:

*Updated (1990s) kitchen with ample storage, recessed lighting, and 2009 kitchen floor
*Efficient and comfortable hot water baseboard heat, with recently upgraded Burnham boiler. Three programmable zones.
*2 wall air conditioning units cool house if needed
*Double-pane glass and/or storm windows on each of the 50 windows. Screens.
*Storage shed
*Bluestone patio surrounded by Zen-like moss gardens with a lit bluestone walkway. Lights controllable from both house and *road-side entrance
*Bluestone path around perimeter of house
*Outdoor spaces designed by noted Concord Landscape architect Elizabeth Carlhian shortly after the construction
*Underground water line from house to garden terminal. Separate water meter.
*Wired for FIOS
*Hardwood floors on main living level (under carpet) and bedroom level.
*Newer window blinds
*Utility room/workshop with expanded storage cabinetry
*Crawl space storage with interior access
*Directly across street from egress into Sutherland Woods Conservation area
*Pool membership/fragmentary ownership incluuded in small homeowner association fee.


Price: $699,000



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)

Price change at 10 Moon Hill Rd.

(SOLD/July 2010)

Huge price drop to $959,000!

Details here: 10MoonHill.com

10 Moon Hill - The Sills House For Sale

(SOLD July/2010)

In the June 1950 issue of Architectural Forum magazine profile on the homes of Six Moon Hill, the Sills House, 10 Moon Hill Road, is described as, "designed for one of Six Moon Hill's few non-academic couples, this carefully detailed house has reserve space to provide for future family growth... A slate floor throughout the central area contrasts pleasantly with chimney brick and natural plywood panels and ties this space in with the flagstone terrace... Separated from the living area by only a two-way fireplace and a low storage cabinet for records, the dining space may be used for general entertaining."

Click to enlarge:





Well, the cabinet is gone, but then -- perhaps unfortunately -- so are many peoples' record collections. But now the floor plan is even more dazzlingly open, with an updated kitchen flowing into the dining area and, beyond the two-sided fireplace, the living room, which itself seems to flow naturally into the landscape outside the walls of glass. Oral history passed down through the three sets of owners has it that none other than Walter Gropius himself stood in the kitchen admiring this fireplace.





Scroll to see additional 2009 photos of the house below.


Stats for 10 Moon Hill Road

Price: $1,048,888, showings to begin March 10, 2010.

8 rooms

4 bedrooms

2.5 baths

2319 s.f. of living area

2 zones of radiant heat

Oil + propane

Discreet ductless mini-split air conditioning

2007 renovated Master suite with large Duravit soaking tub; multi-jet tiled shower with glass doors; large vanity/dressing area and closets; laundry room; private patio overlooking Japanese-style gardens

Flooring: hardwood; slate; stained concrete with radiant heat.

Finished, above-grade, walk-out lower-level family room, bedroom, and half bath.

Modern, recently (2008) renovated kitchen with stone countertops, 2008 appliances, flooring, and lighting.

Carport with enclosed storage.

Built 1948

26,136 square foot lot, professionally landscaped

Neighborhood association, common land, and swimming pool ($510/year without pool use; $950/year with pool use, approximately)

Prior owners: Sills 48-56; Marion Sheehan 56-02

Additions: Carport (TAC, 1956); Master bedroom suite (Dick Morehouse, 1980)

Floor plans (click):




Town appraisal card

Lexington GIS viewer




The Architects Collaborative partners

Robert McMillan designed the 10 Moon Hill Road house for the Sills family. He later headed the Rome office of TAC before leaving TAC and starting his own firm, remaining in Rome.

The house has been brought up to today's standards of simple luxury. An early renovation designed by TAC created the ground floor living room and a carport with storage. The master bedroom wing, designed by TAC partner Dick Moorhouse, was added in the 1980's.

The entire house has been completely upgraded in the last three years, while scrupulously maintaining the original architectural character of the home. Recent renovations include:

• MBR: Complete gut renovation 2007

• Other Bedrooms, bath: Complete gut renovation 2008

• Kitchen: Complete gut renovation 2008 with all new cabinets, utilities and appliances.

• Lower level family room, bedroom, bath: Complete gut renovation 2009

• Alarm system: New system installed 2008

• Roof membrane: resealed 2007

• Electrical system: almost entire house is brand new.

• House exterior painted 2008.





The original kitchen of 10 Moon Hill Rd. as featured in a 1950s home magazine:









About Moon Hill and TAC

In 1947, one young group of forward-thinking architects, The Architects Collaborative (TAC), founded by Bauhaus pioneer, Walter Gropius -- who had fled Germany and joined Harvard University Graduate School of Design -- purchased 20 acres of land on the east-central side of Lexington and formed a non-profit corporation for the community they named Six Moon Hill.

According to personal interviews with some of the partners and residents conducted by Aram Demirjian, the land had been owned since 1908 by a retired automobile dealer, described as "a stubborn and slightly intimidating man... suspicious of TAC's motives for their desire to purchase his land," which was a wooded hill and on the east side of town, and thus convenient to the TAC office in Harvard Square. Ultimately a deal was struck with the former auto dealer, who had held on to six 1920s-era Moon cars in a barn on the property. Appropriately, the development was named Six Moon Hill.

Laid out on a cul-de-sac, they set aside common land to leave as open space, including an area with a swimming pool. They built about 26 houses in the International modernist style: walls of glass, open floor plans, flat or slant roofs, simple and inexpensive materials, austere lines, nestled thoughtfully into the landscape. Though they at first might have seemed out of place—European modernist statements plopped down in the middle of wooded Lexington and adjacent to farms—they actually reflected the old clichés regarding New England Yankee frugality, sensibility, and working with materials at hand. As an article in the Boston Globe pointed out not too long ago, the houses of Moon Hill “remain remarkably unpretentious and livable.” And, when one stops to think about it, what would have been more out of place than Grecian columns on a farmhouse in the middle of a New England field when those originally started appearing? The Moon Hill houses were as unassuming, if not more so, than the good old white-clapboarded colonials dotting the town. Unlike reproductions of that familiar style, the modernist architects saw no need to busy up the facades of their homes with fake shutters, mullioned windows, cupolas and the like. And the use of rubber, tar and gravel, and other new building materials and techniques did away with the need for steeply gabled roofs to dump away the snow, rain and other byproducts of the New England climate.

More photos and information about TAC, Moon Hill, Five Fields, Peacock Farm and more, found here at our Modernism in Massachusetts site.

Six Moon Hill on Wikipedia

Moon Hill

My Scorcese one-shot iPhone video tour.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

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)

Stay Tuned to This Space

We have 2 listings coming on in the next few weeks, one in Peacock Farm, and one in Six Moon Hill.