Long Island Sound, Connecticut - a masterpiece by Connecticut

9/21/2025 03:49:00 PM

On a rocky point of the Connecticut coast overlooking the eastern reaches of Long Island Sound, architect Ulrich Franzen built this house for a family with three children-two teen-age sons and one younger daughter. A well-weathered lighthouse of whitewashed brick stands guard over the point, but the site for the house was virtually man-made. The architect filled in parts of the original 1/3 acre and across it built a high stone-walled platform large enough to elevate the 3,060- square-foot house and its surrounding decks and terraces well above the stormiest waves. This height alone provides a good measure of privacy from beach and street as well as a panoramic view of the Sound.

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From certain angles the house gives the illusion of being a complex of separate buildings. But its plan is in reality quite simple-an H- shape with a central living room flanked on one side by dining room and kitchen and on the other by bedrooms for parents and daughter. In dramatic contrast to this simplicity at floor level is the delightful diversity of the three-dimensional space. For the paraboloid ceiling, that seems to float like four huge umbrellas above the glass walls and gable ends of the huge living room, is 5 feet higher than the ceilings of the rest of the house. And as you move from room to room you are treated continually to a different view-toward the Sound, across the harbor or to grassy flower-planted terraces. The walls of the house are not all glass-in fact the brick walls at the front and back of both wings are quite windowless. Yet from each of the main rooms you can look out and walk out onto a terrace or deck that extends the mood as well as the actual dimensions of the adjoining rooms.

Not least among the qualities that mark this house as true architecture is the whole concept of its structure. It is the steel posts, frankly exposed, that give the design the look of strength appropriate to the rugged site. Only because of six great steel supports that hold up the intricately curved steel-framed ceiling in the living room was it possible to create a 30-by-31-foot expanse of space uninterrupted by walls or columns.