If you have ever looked hopefully for the small house that “has everything,” we invite you to join us on a tour of the Century 21 Idea House. While no house spells perfection for all families, we believe this one—designed and built in Seattle as a co-operative effort by H&G, the Georgia-Pacific Corporation and architects Bassetti and Morse—goes far to prove that great ideas can be incorporated at moderate price in quite limited space. The Century 21 Idea House was designed to gratify the fondest wishes of a young couple with one or two children. Built to sell for under $35,000, its compact and disciplined plan includes seven large, well-proportioned rooms, two bathrooms, a powder room, three porches, a two-car garage and a good-size paved terrace. The best part of this architectural bargain, however, is something money alone cannot buy: imaginative design and superb craftsmanship. Note first the unique silhouette achieved by a series of peaked and shingled roofs. Interesting for their visual effect, they fulfill an even greater purpose by clearly defining the major zones of family activity inside the house, which radiate out from a central T-shaped floor area paved in quarry tile.
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.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1962
There is a style of country house in France called a manoir—a design for bucolic living that lies somewhere along the architectural path between a glorified farmhouse and a very modest chateau. Its spirit has been transported to Greenwich, Conn., in a house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin H. Bartholow that represents the collaboration of three people: the architect, George Hickey III Associates; the interior designer, Mary Dunn of Nancy McClelland Inc.; and Mrs. Bartholow herself who is a tireless collector of French furniture. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bartholow had lived in city apartments since they were children, but bitten by a sudden impulse to become suburbanites, they bought the first house they thought they liked. They discovered they did not, however, so they sold it, and their next move was more deliberate. Enlisting the aid of Miss Dunn, who, in turn, recruited Mr. Hickey, Mrs. Bartholow gave her designers carte blanche with the provision that—when she chose to wield it—they would honor an editorial blue pencil. Proceeding on the theory that as ardent a devotee of French furniture as Mrs. Bartholow would be most at home in a house with a compatibly French flavor, the architect designed a latter-day version of the manoir. The house is successful because it answers, on every count, Mrs. Bartholow's request for simply stated elegance, compactness (for all its engaging look of sprawl) and pure Gallic countryside charm.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
source: House and Garden Magazine | May 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
