Scale model of the house indicates its adaptability to any site, any orientation. Irregularities of terrain can be ignored because concrete piers of different heights raise house clear of ground. This technique eliminates much bulldozing, and so helps to preserve trees and other distinctive features of the site. As a result of the options offered by the system of open or closed bays, the rooms can easily be located to take advantage of the best views; terraces can be placed to enjoy the most desirable exposures, and other outdoor areas can be made an integrated part of the over-all design and landscaping of house.

ARCHITECT: Robert Damora 
DEVELOPERS: Emil Hanslin Associates
LANDSCAPE DESIGNER: Suzanne Sisson
DECORATOR: Melanie Kahane
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Sepp Firnkas
LOCATION: Mashpee, Mass.
SIZE: 1,480 square feet of enclosed space 1,184 square feet of terrace

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source: House and Garden Magazine | February 1963

If some people find serenity in an easy, informal flow of space, others derive calmness of spirit from the measured cadences of spaces precisely drawn and clearly organized. Among the partisans of the second point of view are Mr. and Mrs. John Winterbotham of Houston, Tex., whose Palladian-like villa of glass, steel and Mexican brick shows how pleasantly relaxing formal order can be. The plan is an extension of Mrs. Winterbotham’s theory that the only way to run a household is for everyone to have a specific territory. This is yet another example of the multiple house. Moreover, every room has a clearly defined function and is, in a sense, a place apart. But the delights of the house go deeper than the smooth organization of daily living—there is a sense of satisfaction and completeness in the whole concept of its design. At the front of the house, tall gates, stretched between two projecting wings, convey a sense of well-ordered, highly civilized composure. But at the back, the elegant geometry of tiers of glass contrasts unabashedly with the luxuriance of a landscape dense with live oaks and dreamy Spanish moss. Paradoxically, this very failure to meet nature halfway via natural materials and rustic informality only goes to emphasize the untrammeled naturalness of the surroundings and the sense of closeness to the outdoors.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | November 1962

Both front and back walls are quite windowless except for glass gable ends, and the carport screens the entrance terrace. But floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors open to this terrace from the dining room on one side and from a bedroom on the other. Similar sliding doors open from the guest-study and the master bedroom to the covered terrace in the rear which is shielded from the neighbors’ view by a fence. The plan is also designed to save on the cost of installing utilities, for kitchen, bathrooms and heating-cooling systems are all consolidated in the center of the house. Laundry equipment is in a niche in the larger bathroom where it is wonderfully convenient to the nursery. The house was sponsored by Crown Aluminum Industries, with furnishings from Sears Roebuck.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | November 1962

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Gemini AI Rendering of the architect's sketch

She believes, for instance, that the best way to be sure the furniture you want will fit into a new house is to assemble the furniture first. So she had templates drawn of her antiques and the new furniture she planned to buy, worked out arrangements on paper and asked her architect to design the rooms around them. She designed the detail for the tall mahogany screens she wanted for her living room, spent hours with a paint expert, experimenting with stain to get just the right shade. She wanted a high pitched ceiling, so she had the roof framing propped up in order to study it at various angles—not only from within the room, but from outside the house. A host of ideas about kitchen storage that she had already worked out in her previous house were copied, drawer-for-drawer, in her new one. 

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source: House and Garden Magazine | November 1962

Near the hearth in the glass-walled living room of the Allen Hurlburts’ house in New Canaan, Conn., stands a painted rocking chair that has refreshed and solaced four generations of Hurlburts. Happily at home in its contemporary setting, yet highly expressive of continuity with the past, this chair symbolizes the atmosphere of the whole house and the feelings that brought it into being. Unmistakably contemporary, and designed for commuters rather than farmers, the house is nevertheless a true descendant of the old Connecticut farmhouses. It reflects the Hurlburts’ abiding attachment to regional traditions and, at the same time, their wholehearted commitment to today’s way of living.

Mr. Hurlburt’s family had always lived in this part of Connecticut, and he and his wife had lived in the neighborhood for some time, in a Colonial house. They loved its aura of warmth and the intimacy of its scale. But anticipating the arrival of daughter Susan, they were beginning to feel pressed for space and increasingly confined by the small rooms and tiny windows. Professional training in the arts (he is art director of a leading magazine) had given them respect and understanding for contemporary design, so a contemporary house was their natural and inevitable choice.

Mr. Hurlburt roughed out sketches of what they had in mind, and called in architect Roy Binkley (designer of an adventurous house shown in October H&G). During a weekend visit with them he was able to discover just what they loved about their old house, as well as the special assets of their new site and the regional character of other houses nearby. 

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source: House and Garden Magazine | November 1962

Set off by this central space, each zone becomes, in effect, a separate little “house,” and the central paved area contributes a dramatic impact seldom found in a home of this size (1,950 square feet). Besides serving as the main artery of circulation, this strategic center includes redwood-walled dining and garden rooms which enjoy blessings of an 8-foot square skylight.

As the demand for second houses has grown, vacation sites have correspondingly shrunk, but lakeside cottages, cheek by jowl, or dune bungalows in close parade rarely offer the seclusion so highly valued in a vacation retreat. This ubiquitous problem was neatly side-stepped, however, by the house that California designer John Carden Campbell built for himself on a 60-by-60-foot lot in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Instead of looking outward, his house turns inward to face a glass-walled court that brings the outdoors into the very heart of the building. Open to the sky and lush with plants and flowers in pots and tubs, the court is like an enchanting garden. Yet it is an inseparable part of the house and through its glass walls you can see the whole 32-by-40-feet of interior as one flowing space—a continuity which is emphasized by the use of the same flooring throughout. The walls and ceiling as well as the floor are all of 2-by-6-inch tongue-and-groove white fir planks, nailed to a post and beam framework, and the whole structure rests on ready-made concrete piers. As a happy result of this simple construction, the architect was able to build the house for approximately $7,800.

Since the court brings light and air to the whole house, there are only four exterior windows. Two at the front are fitted with obscure glass jalousies that let in air but screen from sight a neighboring house. At the back, glass doors flanked by a pair of clear windows take in an unobstructed view of lush green valley and rolling hills which you can see through the court as you come in the front door. 

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source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1962

Anyone who ever spent a childhood summer rambling among the rocks by a wild seacoast, discovering the treasures of the tide pools or wading in the surging waves, can imagine the delight of architect Fletcher Ashley's four young daughters with the house their father built in Ogunquit, Me. Dubbed "The Rockhouse," it perches high on a cliff that plunges 30 feet down to the Atlantic below, commanding superb views from every room and from the decks that surround it. On the big rear deck that extends out over the rocks, you might think you were on a ship, with nothing in sight but the expanse of sea and an occasional lobster boat. But from the screened porch and the smaller deck that hugs the house, you survey the ancient rocks and magnificent pines.

A sliding glass door opens directly from the entrance walk into a living room so big and so carefree it seems less like a room than a large and delightful recreation area. The opposite wall composed entirely of sliding glass doors opens the room to the porch and deck. At the right of the front door is a series of folding birch doors that close off the kitchen section. The length of the living room serves as a buffer between the girls' rooms at one end and their parents' at the other. Mr. and Mrs. Ashley's own quarters include a spacious bedroom, dressing room, the bonus of a screened sleeping porch. 

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source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1962

Terraces, one or many, are most successful, most rewarding in terms of pleasure, when they are indivisible from the houses they complement. If they reflect, as they should, the nature of the rooms they adjoin, and share the same purpose they can be as much a part of the house as its roof, and as varied in mood as the pattern of indoor living to which they correspond. This is beautifully illustrated by the house of many terraces in Longmeadow, Mass., that architect Elroy Webber designed for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Kuzon. Its over-all plan developed naturally from the device the architect used to cope with the undulating site: a raised rectangular platform to hold both house and terraces. 

The platform is as wide (104 feet) as its wedge-shaped plot will permit it to be, and as deep (80 feet) as it needs to be to provide all the living space, indoor and outdoor, that the Kuzons require and enjoy. In dramatic reversal of the Mediterranean house that surrounds its courtyards, this house is surrounded by a geometric girdle of five terraces. Glass walls, except on the street side of the house, permit perfect visual flow between the rooms and the adjacent terraces, while each terrace exists as an exterior complement to the room or rooms on the other side of the glass. Thus, covered or not, the house really begins at the perimeter of the platform. This romantic concept emphatically contradicts the view of New England as a stern country where home planners, out of deference to the elements, must place practicality first. The Kuzons' house is eminently practical, but its outdoor rooms add to its indoor living the delights of being surrounded by walls of greenery and treillage in summer, and by a sculptured overlay of snow-capped evergreens in winter.

THICK woods near South Hadley, Mass., supplied the site for this house which was designed for Dr. Virginia Galbraith, professor of economics at Mt. Holyoke College. The particular delight that Dr. Galbraith wanted was the airy sense of invisible shelter provided by a glass house in the middle of the woods. That, in essence, is what she has—enhanced by a refinement in privacy proposed by her architect.

The house is not large—1,052 square feet of living space, plus a partial basement—but it is large enough for Dr. Galbraith's needs as well as for entertaining as many as seventy-five guests at one time. The main living area, left, has floor-to-ceiling walls of glass on four sides. But the 36-foot expanse of glass at the back of the house, above, faces a 600-acre tract of oak and birch owned by the college and therefore completely secluded. And the front of the house, which is set back 50 feet from the road on a downward slope, is screened by apple trees, dogwood and hemlocks. Because of the trees, Dr. Galbraith says, she never feels exposed. Nevertheless, her architect advised total privacy for the bedroom area—“and my architect,” she agrees, “was right.” Three walls of the bedroom itself are windowless, and although the fourth is glass, it faces a patio with high walls on two sides. But the patio is open to the woods at the back, so that even in her bedroom Dr. Galbraith enjoys the luxuriousness of a house set in the woods.

She was delighted to find that in spite of her glass walls and the rigors of Massachusetts’ winters, the house does not cost a fortune to heat. In winter, when the trees are bare, the sun warms the house so well that the forced-air heating system rarely turns on during the day. In summer, the heavy foliage holds back the sun so that the bedroom-patio area is often 5° to 8° cooler than outside.

Above all, Dr. Galbraith enjoys the elegance and drama of the house and the beauty of its proportions—along with its intimate relationship to the outdoors.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | August 1962

Do you measure bigness in a house in terms of square feet or by the number of rooms? Can a four-room house work and feel like one with twice that many? The answer is yes, when the interior space is handled as skillfully as it is in Mr. and Mrs. Donald Sheff's house in Great Neck, N. Y. The house has exactly four rooms plus a kitchen and two baths. Nonetheless, it fits the young couple's needs and wants like a beautifully tailored glove and gives them 2,050 square feet of highly personalized pleasure.

Enormously energetic, the Sheffs have widely ranging interests that keep them chronically busy both at home and in the business world. They work as a team at an enterprise involving a series of secretarial schools. They entertain often, with pleasure and with distinction, since Mrs. Sheff is a gourmet cook to whom dinner for two is as important as a buffet for thirty. Both she and her husband love flowers and gardening (given the time), bright colors and, almost more than anything, the serenity of spaciousness and the delight of vista.

It took them a long time to pin down what they wanted in a house. Fascinated by architecture, in an unpedantic way, they read seriously on the subject, visited new houses right and left. Armed, finally, with a clear awareness of their values and preferences, they asked their architect, George Nemeny, for a home that would be satisfying to the eye, amenable to their pattern of living and easy to keep up. And Mr. Nemeny, sensitive to their idiosyncrasies, designed them a remarkably simple house that imposes no jurisdictions. Each room is large enough to work as two, and does. All the walls work, too—instead of merely dividing space, they also accommodate floor-to-ceiling storage. Ceilings are 10 feet high (in the living room, a vaulted skylight lifts the eye 2 feet higher) and glass walls extend each room out to a terrace and to the kind of easily maintained landscape that is such a joy to the true, if only part-time, horticulturist.

The simplicity of the house is admirably suited to the Sheffs' highly individual manner of living. "It imposes no pattern of its own," Mrs. Sheff explains. In decorating it, she felt free to indulge her flair for color, and Mr. Sheff was inspired to tackle a number of do-it-yourself projects, including the paving of the terraces and much of the planting. As a result, they look upon the house, not as static shelter, but as an active, wholly cooperative partner in their lives.