Minimum maintenance and maximum privacy are the outstanding assets of this small house in Skillman, N.J., designed with a young family in mind—a couple with a daughter in grade school and a son who is still a baby. Of wood frame construction, the house is sheathed in horizontal clapboard siding of aluminum, which is the key to its economical maintenance. The baked-on enamel finish will rarely need repainting and its freshness can be restored by simply hosing down the outside of the house. The roof, too, is aluminum so there is nothing to come loose or catch fire during a storm or to rot from dampness. Close-to-total privacy is afforded by the plan of the house — even in a built-up community, on a site with near neighbors on three sides and a street in front. 

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

 An energetic perfectionist, the woman who lives in this house in Montecito, Calif., knows how to profit from all her experience in living. She and her husband had already built and lived in two former houses, so when they decided to build a third, she knew exactly what she wanted. And she worked around the clock with her architect and decorator to achieve it.

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

 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. 

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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