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. 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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.

You enter the Rasbach house by way of a raftered patio that expresses, in every detail, not only the spirit of the house, but also its practicality. The sturdy paving of inexpensive Mexican terra-cotta tile needs little maintenance, so the Rasbachs extended it throughout the ground floor where it offers no hindrance to the comings and goings of children and pets. Thick stucco-coated walls, proverbial for their coolness, are also repeated indoors since their roughened surfaces bear up well under scuffs or dirt or even gouges. The airy balcony (also the corresponding one at the back of the house) and the floor-length windows in the upstairs rooms where the Rasbach boys sleep, seem to extend these rooms outdoors. (Although there is a house-wide air-conditioning system, the Rasbachs like natural ventilation whenever possible.) Expanses of glass, framed in wood with dark stain, are shielded from the hot southwest sun by heavy shutters but during cooler hours the sliding glass walls afford contemporary freedom.