Property of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Smallen, New Canaan, Connecticut | architect: Hugh Smallen

10/07/2025 12:46:00 AM

Architect Hugh Smallen and his wife belong to a community of designers who for two decades have been flocking to New Canaan, Conn., to work as well as live in that picturesque exurb of New York. The Smallens' commute is a breezy ten-minute drive between their office in New Canaan proper, where Mrs. Smallen heads the interior design section of her husband's firm, and their new house, a white-painted, vertical flush board structure that sits atop a gentle rise off a peaceful, country road. Beginning with the mounds of pine needles, beds of wild strawberries and slopes of white violets that surround the house with a sweet smell and render constant lawn tending unnecessary, architect Smallen has geared his home to easy maintenance. The key to the design of the house is a gradually upslanting roof that combines with downslanting ground to accommodate a house which is one story high at one end, two stories at the other.

Although the Smallens' daughters-Candida, 18, a college sophomore, and Amy, 16, a senior at boarding school-are away much of the academic year, teenage traffic is heavy on weekends and in summer. Often a young visitor will sleep overnight, sometimes to help crew the family's sailboat, sometimes just to join the lounging that goes on outdoors on the silvery fir sun decks that are flush with the floor of the house. In warm weather the Smallens eat on the deck outside the dining room and give large dancing parties on the terrace deck which gets a gay yellow and white awning for such occasions. Like the decks, which are distinct but accessible spaces that need little care and are genuinely comfortable to use, the rest of the house was planned wholly realistically.

The living room, 14 feet high at its highest, is relatively open territory, depending on who has how much company. The kitchen and dining room are also communal areas as op- posed to the bedroom side of the house where there is a lower floor for the girls and an upper floor for Mr. and Mrs. Smallen. "We live in here," says Mrs. Smallen of her truly master-size bedroom that also contains the amenities of a den-a wall of books, a giant table desk and TV. Both parents' and daughters' quarters are floored with vinyl asbestos and furnished with simple birch. The girls have generous space for sleep, gab and study and for perfecting their guitar, recorder and accordion playing. When they are not practicing or harmonizing, their phonograph is apt to be wafting anything from baroque to bossa nova throughout the house. Altogether, it is a house which, thanks to the major planning and also to the innumerable refinements (such as the tone of the living room's walnut floor, neither so light nor so dark that it shows scuffs) has withstood the family's active life very well.