Ezra Stoller Shots

Thanks for architect, Tim Techler (his link is included on the right), for pointing us toward the Esto.com site, which includes some invaluable shots of Moon Hill taken by Ezra Stoller.

More on Ezra Stoller.

7 Moon Hill Rd. -- The Mann House

The spirit of exploration and invention, led by philosophy, can be present in an office. Ideas are welcomed from wherever they come. Architectural music is orchestral rather than solo. Every member is involved.


-- Sally Harkness, on the "collaborative" part of The Architects Collaborative (TAC) firm


Sally Harkness was the principal TAC partner behind the design of 7 Moon Hill Road, the Mann House. The original owners were Harold and Muriel Mann.

The house is currently being offered for sale for $995,000 via Hammond Real Estate, with listing agents, Bill Janovitz and John Tse. The first available viewing time is Sunday, October 10, open house 1-3 pm.


One of Moon Hill's finest examples of TAC-designed pioneering modernist homes, the Mann House has renovated and expanded over the years. The open floor plan flows through the living room, family room, kitchen, and dining room. Hardwood floors have been recently refinished. The main hallway leads to five bedrooms, including two suites. A vast sunroom with spa hot tub squares off the floor plan; two-car heated garage with workshop and storage areas, designed by TAC partner, Dick Morehouse. There is approximately 3487 s.f. of living area. Walls of thermal windows overlook the professionally landscaped grounds (7 Moon Hill Road was known informally as "the Garden House.") A rare offering of a special home.



Depending on your browser, all images should enlarge when clicked.


Some of the Notable Features of 7 Moon Hill Road

Living Room/Family Room

-Recently refinished hardwood floors
-Fireplace
-Open floor plan includes large dining area
-Family room/television area, also could work as dining room
-The flexible floor plan is great for entertaining -- large parties and smaller, more intimate dinners alike
-Custom built-in book shelves and other original architectural features
-Glass doors to enclosed three-season porch
-Tree-top views through abundant windows
-Thermal walls of glass with thermal blinds





Kitchen

-Updated in the 1990s
-Subzero Refrigerator installed 2000 (+/-)
-Bosch Dishwasher
-Granite tile
-Custom cabinets
-Large space divided by island
-Abundant cabinets
-Separate entrance from side of house
-Double wall ovens



Master Bedroom

-Walk-in closet
-Built-in dressers
-Second closet
-Built-in desk
-Large shower stall in en suite bath

Guest/Au Pair/In-law/Teen Suite

-En suite full bath
-Walk-in closet
-Separate entrance, glass doors to three-season sunroom/patio
-Direct access to attached greenhouse

Additional Three Bedrooms

-Various built-in desks, dressers, custom closets

Entry Level

-Gracious entry foyer with marble tile, built-in bench and shelves, and large closet
-lexible room with fireplace -- could be a playroom, den, rec room, library, or its current use as a home office. Walls of windows allow plentiful natural light
-Laundry room
-Half bath with marble tile
-Utility room

Systems

-Five zones of radiant and hot water baseboard heat
-Wall-unit air conditioning (two mini-splits and two traditional wall-installed units)
-Water main located in garage
-Propane heat in garage

Miscellaneous

-Original house designed by Sally Harkness, noted partner of The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Additions and expansions also designed by TAC partners
-Windows replaced with insulated glass approximately 10 years ago on all living areas
-Original built-in desks, bureaus, and bookshelves throughout
-Most likely cork-tile floor under carpets in hall/bedrooms
-Master bedroom extended circa 1980s, designed by Norman Fletcher
-Hallway display case
-Motion-sensor exterior lighting

Three-Season Sunroom/Enclosed Patio
-Walls of glass sliding doors with screens
-Year-round hot tub/spa
-Six skylights
-Custom-built free-standing flower boxes.





Exterior

-Rubber roof replaced about 1995, updated around 2000 (all dates approximate)
-Vertical siding
-Perimeter drains installed around rear and sides of house and in front of garage (street side)
-Greenhouse attached, with direct access to bathroom. 7 Moon Hill Rd. was informally known thoughtout Six Moon Hill neighborhood as “The Garden House.”
-Professionally landscaped

Two-Car Garage

-Designed by Dick Morehouse
-Two-car
-Heated, propane
-Workshop area with sink and bench, in rear
-Separate storage room






Here is a shot of the original house, prior to expansions, renovations, and other changes. The viewer will note that the original bookcases seen in this shot are still featured in the current iteration of the house.



More archival Moon Hill shots here.

About Moon Hill and TAC

There are two ways to go -- towards competition or towards collaboration. A contest can be stimulation, but as a way of life competition is wasteful. Time and energy are dissipated in overlapping efforts. The efficiency of collaboration lies in interaction directed towards the solution of a problem. A world that believes only in survival through competition must always be at war. And if the winner is preoccupied with winning, he may find himself on a mountain he never would have chosen to climb. In architecture, rivalry may lead to irrational design; it may put aside a direct solution in favor of a more sensational one.

To fight for conviction is another matter, and this fits in with collaboration. The essence of collaboration is the strength of the individual. When collaboration is operating as it should, a good idea will be carried by conviction, recognized by others without loss of their own prestige.

-- Sally Harkness



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

New Pictures from the Hugh Stubbins-designed "Boggs House"

These excellent shots were taken by photographer, David Travers. (Click to enlarge, as with any image on this site).

The house had multiple offers the first weekend listed and is currently under agreement.

New Moon Hill Listing

Watch this space for an upcoming new listing of a TAC house on Moon Hill Rd. Should be ready by October 8 or so.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Hugh Stubbins-Designed House in Lincoln

We are proud to be representing the owners of this modernist home, The Baggs House in Lincoln, MA.


The House

A rare offering of a Hugh Stubbins-designed three-bedroom private residence, a mid-century modernist classic thoughtfully sited on a private two-acre lot in a neighborhood of multi-million-dollar estates. Open-concept main floor offers abundant natural light and great flexible flow. Two bedrooms and a studio/office on the main level; newer master suite with fireplace; a recently updated kitchen. Very fun studio/playhouse tower greets visitors. Have you longed to be the artist in a garret?

The Baggs House was commissioned in 1952 by Arthur Baggs, an engineer for Polaroid and his wife. The young architect, Hugh Stubbins, had done some work for the company and that is apparently where he met Baggs.

Mrs. Baggs was an artist. The space currently used as a family room was her studio, and the north-facing skylight, windows and perforated overhang were designed to provide plenty of indirect light for the space. She also did not like direct lighting of interior spaces; visitors will notice that almost all the lighting in house is in coves and soffits, and reflects off the ceilings.








Master Bedroom



The Architect



Despite regular predictions of its imminent demise -- or survival only as an anachronism -- the private house has remained at the core of the American Dream of the good life. Shelter magazines sell more copies than ever and there is probably no building type closer to the architect's heart...

...Houses have frequently been thought of as the architects' design research laboratory, but this approach should be adopted only with caution, lest the clients' needs and desires get lost in search for a new form...

...When I started into practice, I was fortunate. The American house was going through a kind of evolution. Glass walls, open planning, and exposed structural materials all reflected new construction techniques and an increasingly informal lifestyle that has remained with us. Some of my early houses thus still seem, I think, quite contemporary today.


-- Hugh Stubbins, 1976


Hugh Stubbins was a 23 year-old young man from Birmingham, Alabama, newly graduated from Harvard's School of Design, when he was hired by Royal Barry Wills to help provide a modern counterpart to Wills' seminal Cape Cod-style plans. Though the small house plan was hugely popular, Wills' felt pressured by young architects influenced by a more International Style of modernism, specifically, Richard Neutra's 1935 competition winner. The resulting structures took the same philosophy that Wills implemented in his affordable and small, but well-designed, Cape Cods and applied them to more forward-leaning, lighter-weight structures with open-floor plans and cleaner lines. Perhaps the most important architectural element that was continued from the traditional New England structures was the post-and-beam construction of barns, This allows ultimate flexibility in interior wall placement and, subsequently, adaptable and expandable floor plans. Unrestrained from the constrictions of outer load-bearing walls, Stubbins was free to use walls of glass and other modern design techniques. The economy of the modest Royal Barry Wills Cape would now be translated into homes more in tune with their surroundings, with outer garden walls continuing into interior living areas, and the idea of the chimney extending out through the roof, so literally central to the Royal Barry Wills Cape, was taken even further, with fireplaces themselves as part of a wall that could extend beyond the exterior walls.



The first Stubbins/Wills house, Needham, MA

Stubbins' tenure with Wills was brief (three years) but fruitful. He eventually went on to form a short-lived partnership with Marc Peter. Walter Gropius invited him to take a faculty position at Harvard in 1940. He formed friendships with the Bauhaus master, as well as highly notable pioneers like Alvar Aalto and Marcel Breuer. After Gropius' resignation, Stubbins became Chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard School of Design. In 1946, Stubbins built his own modernist house in Lexington, and the town soon became a hotbed for Bauhaus-inspired modernist developments Six Moon Hill and Five Fields -- neighborhoods developed by The Architects Collaborative -- and Peacock Farm, started by young MIT architects, Walter Pierce and Dan Compton. Stubbins started his own firm from a small office in his own house, which saw the likes of some of his former students, then employees, like I.M Pei,and Robert Geddes. Other notable students of his include Philip Johnson, Sarah and Chip Harkness (also Lexingtonians, on Moon Hill), and Paul Rudolph. The firm grew from mostly private residential commissions in the outer-metro suburban rings of Boston and other metropolitan areas, into institutional buildings for the booming world of academia, and eventually designing monumental skyscrapers and urban landmarks like the Citicorp Center in New York City, the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, and Congress Hall in Berlin. This University of Massachusetts alum is proud to have once lived in a dormitory there in the Southwest residential area designed by Hugh Stubbins and Associates.



Stubbins' family house in Lexington, MA


The Land




When the Baggs bought it, the property was roughly 12 acres, and a farmhouse formerly sat on the original building site. The farmhouse burned down in the '40s. The stone garden walls behind the current house were rebuilt on the farmhouse foundations. The route around the site to the garage is actually an old farm road that led from the back of the old farmhouse to a barn that was on Winter St. (the stone foundation of which, remained until the mid-1990's.) The Baggs' donated four or five acres of wetlands (off Winter St.) to conservation, and sold the roughly two acres (the lot to the north with the house on the rock) to a landscape architect who lived there until about 2000. That left roughly six acres that they lived on and sold eventually.

There was a "no subdivision" covenant on the property when it was sold, which the current owner believes would have expired in the early 2000s. Mrs. Baggs passed away in the mid-90's, the covenant was removed soon after and the property was subdivided into three lots by right. The Stubbins/Baggs house sat only a couple of feet from the new property line, and the lot was being marketed as raw land, assuming that the house would be torn down (because of it proximity to the property line, it became illegal as a result of the subdivision).


The current owners moved the house forward about 100 feet on the site, and maintained its original orientation. The move was a little tricky in that the house had to be raised up high enough so that the front entrance landing and the steel supporting it had to pass over the stone wall. The reason it had to go over the stone wall was because it also had to go around(and under) the locust tree. Pulleys were rigged up in the high branches and weights used to lift up the lower branches. The fireplace in the master bedroom was constructed while the house was in the air, and the original fireplace was lowered down onto it.


Notable Features of 149 Old County Road


*Designed by renowned international architect, Hugh Stubbins
*Post and beam construction
*Moved to current site (on same land) by current owners 1998#
*Recently (2005) built master suite with:
*Walk-in tiled/glass shower
*Double sink vanity
*Walk-in closet with custom-cabinetry
Fireplace
*Hardwood floors
*Artist studio for alternate use as family room or office
*Two additional bedrooms with custom built-ins and lofts
*Full shared bath
*Living room with hardwood floors, cathedral ceilings; plentiful natural light; balcony
*Dining room continues open floor plan from living room
*Renovated (2005) kitchen with ceramic tile; granite counters; stainless steel appliances; Bosch dishwasher
*Lower level storage and additional basement
*Two-car garage with green roof, uses original house foundation
*Separate outbuilding: studio/playroom tower (completed 2005)
*Thoughtfully sited on two-acre lot with great outdoor space, multiple decks and patios
*Seasonal views of Cambridge Reservoir

# all dates approximate


Price $799,000

Available for showings beginning 9/18/10

Contact via email for more info



Sources:


1. Hugh Stubbins and his Associates: The First Fifty Years; Diane M. Ludman, 1986 The Stubbins Associates Inc.


2. Hugh Stubbins: Architecture, The Design Experience; Edited by Susan Braybrooke; 1976 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

3. Current owner.

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).

Bauhaus in The Burbs

An excellent article in Design New England from my good buddy, Bruce Irving, who was a longtime producer at the show This Old House.