FPO
When we came across the Cambridge house, it was decidedly more modern than any home we had worked on to date, and this excited a bunch of “old house” guys. The home had been built in 1950, during a period that gave us the Bauhaus and
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only with the intent, not the lasting result.
house was mostly hidden behind trees and bushes, leaving the carport as the property’s defining feature, something about which neither the homeowner nor his neighbors were thrilled.
stripped much of the original house away and expanded it just slightly to accommodate a small addition. The newly poured concrete, seen here on the side and front of the house, was all we added.
The current homeowner, George Mabry, was a longtime fan of our television show and a self-proclaimed lover of fine homes. These are the sorts of people we
aversion to ornamentation. Accordingly, our house was stripped of detail. The
meet all the time; in fact, we seek them out. But in this case, George’s pronounced
building wasn’t much more than a series of red boxes, angular on most sides, with
love of fine homes seemed . . . well, odd, given his house’s state of disrepair. What
a roof that pitched inward to its center like butterfly wings. The house sat low in a
sort of love affair was he having with the red vertical siding wrapping his home and
bowl-shaped yard and was rotting slowly from the pond that persistently formed
rotting on two sides? George quickly assured us that it wasn’t the house he was in
around it every spring. Thick bushes and trees surrounded the house and made it
love with—it was the location, an indisputably attractive lot less than two miles from
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nearly indistinguishable from the street. Only its dark and cavernous carport—a
Harvard Square. And he was in love with the idea of renovating his home.
I N S E T : Flat roofs
T O P R I G H T : With the
are rarely flat. This house had a leaky butterfly roof that pitched to the center.
addition of stucco and a new stone-clad central fireplace, the house started to take on a new look; less Bauhaus and more Prairie-style.
The house’s style was loosely based on the Bauhaus school, founded by Walter
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International styles, with both their fondness for function over form and their
terrible vestige of the 1950s—could be seen clearly as it lurched toward the road.
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house as we came upon it fifty-six years after its construction, he would be pleased
Usually, when a homeowner tells us he’s been thinking about a renovation for ten years, we proceed with caution. When he goes on to tell us he’s worked with five
Gropius in post–World War I Germany. Gropius eventually landed just a few blocks
architects during that period, we head for the door. But in this case, we headed to
from this house, at Harvard University, after fleeing Nazi Germany and taking the
the basement instead—to look at four fully constructed architectural models that
dean’s post at the Harvard School of Architecture (today the Harvard University
represented four completely different plans for a renovation of George’s tired but
Graduate School of Design). I have a hunch that, had Gropius strolled by the
not-so-old modern house. The wildly different styles of the models made it clear that
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