THE house you build today will probably cost you more than ever before, but your building dollars can buy a better house than in the past. Through improved equipment and easy-upkeep materials, it will yield a real bonus in comfort and convenience. When you add to this the fact that architects have devised ways to make small space seem spacious, to give compact quarters privacy, and to capitalize on the site, you can see that a house can pay its way in easier and pleasanter daily living. For a good house is more than a collection of rooms or ideas, it is a total experience. The house in the Berkshires, shown here has all these merits and more. Its owners feel that the celebrated architect, Marcel Breuer, has designed a house which for them is "something more than perfect." In a simple and logical way it includes all of the things they wanted: a one-story plan open to a magnificent view which encircles their land; personal specifications such as a center for music, an arrangement for growing plants indoors, etc. The inside and outside have been designed to interlock. This is immediately apparent. The entrance patio is outdoors, yet it has three walls, a partial roof, and the same slate floor as the inside hall. As you step inside, you look straight through a glass wall opposite the entrance to the outdoors again. The two window walls of the living room project you into the view of the hills, but "so you won't swim in the landscape like a fish in a bowl," architect Breuer built in visual "stop" signs: a low stone parapet outside the room, a margin of wall. and translucent glass above the windows. The house is terraced into the natural contours of the land. A slight ramp from the main living rooms to the bedroom wing effects a change in scale: ceilings are lower, vistas shorter. All the house seems to capture the spirit as well as the form of its owners' way of life.
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source: House and Garden Magazine | February 1949
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