Is the house shown here really modern? Or is it just the opposite? Here is the story behind it. Though it was built in the 20th century, it looks over its shoulder at a house the great Stanford White designed in the 19th. It is the product of its site: sitting the rolling dunes of Long Island comfortably. It looks out to sea through ample windows, but it is in no way a "glassy" house, being wisely enclosed against buffeting autumnal storms. Its materials are as traditional as you please, with reminiscent bays angled into shingled walls. Yet it is a very modern house indeed, if you will accept as a definition a house that uses today's techniques to serve today's way of living. The requirements: a year-round house open and sunny in summer, snug in winter; room for the owners to entertain two upcoming generations expansively; a becoming setting for modern paintings and sculptures that expect excellent light; and a view wherever you are, with glare and rain held equally at bay. At no sacrifice of charm, each requirement was met with skillful and sensitive planning. And beyond the house, outside facing the ocean, a pair of broad sundecks comprise a setting in which the family can entertain itself and its friends.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | July 1958

 

Boating, swimming, skin diving, water skiing, fishing and cruising are how you want to spend your days at lake or seashore and a good vacation house leaves you free to do just that. You needn't worry about tracking sand or water onto the concrete floor of this house, which demands little upkeep anywhere in its simple structure. It opens wide to the outdoors on three sides (one long side flaps up on hinges), and sun deck, screened terrace and dock add as much space outdoors for eating and lounging as there is indoors. Utilities, kitchen compartment and bath are neatly housed in a central core. The tent-like enclosure of the house (it forms both walls and roof) is supported by four A-shaped wood frames anchored in the concrete slab. The structural shape offers good resistance to wind and hurricane for shore sites and, built as a ski hut in the mountains, it will shed heavy snow loads. To close up the house, you latch down the long side, board up the glass gables.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1958

 

Like a Christmas package under the tree, this small Indiana house looks delightful and holds the promise of a happy surprise when you look inside. Its type of classic, rectilinear design is often used for houses of more imposing proportions and cost. Yet the architect, working within the very modest budget at the right, incorporated such uncommon features as 10' ceilings, covered decks on two sides of the house, a hall skylight, custom cabinets, recessed lighting fixtures and large expanses of glass. Modular construction and the careful choice of materials went far to keep the house within its budget. Interestingly, both the architect and the owners ascribe much of its success to "good rapport," which the architect found essential while making his "arduous subtractions." Say the owners: "We worked entirely together from the first plan to the present day."

The living-dining room, a single 27' long sweep, has high ceilings and wood trim that carry out spirit of the neatly paneled exterior walls. Like the lines of the house, the plan is admirably straightforward and efficient. The single hallway serves several purposes: it separates the bedrooms from the living area; it connects the guest bedrooms and bath; and it is wide enough to act as an attractive entrance foyer. While the front of the house, save for the entrance, is windowless, both north and south sides are all glass, relating every principal room to the woodland setting. Doors in each room open to one of the two 4' galleries extending the full length on either side. Framing of glass walls is uniform.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | June 1958

 

The Colonial style house shown here along with the Contemporary and Cape Cod counterparts are the proud products of a quiet revolution in American housing. Each of these houses was designed by an outstanding architect with a view toward satisfying a variety of clients. They reflect custom quality, both in architectural and structural details. Yet it is a happy fact that these three houses, as well as numerous variations of them, can be bought by any American family that yearns for a million dollar look in a home that suits the limits of a modest budget. They are manufactured houses, whose components are engineered and built in the assembly plants of the National Homes Corporation, the nation's largest home-builder.

The three models shown here measure 2,050 square feet, including the two-car garage, and the basic house sells in Lafayette, Indiana, for $22,950. Impressed by both the architectural design and the dollars-and-cents value of these houses, H&G presents here the Colonial "Johnstown" model furnished and decorated for a young family.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | May 1958

 

Although in recent years color has held the center of the stage, the white kitchen is coming back into style but with a difference. If you would like a white kitchen but recall with a shudder the grimly clinical "laboratory kitchens" of the modernistic Twenties and Thirties, take heart. White is a wonderful background if you know how to use it. Because it contains all the shades in the spectrum and is the closest approximation to light, it has an affinity for all colors. Food and accessories become more inviting against white, which sets them off as a mat sets off a painting, and they in turn help to relieve it by reflection. (For instance, an orange ceiling makes a white kitchen seem warm and sunny.) White lends itself to many different effects and enables you to change color schemes at will by a switch of accessories. Designer Valerian S. Rybar combined white in cabinets and equipment with cool blues and hot red-orange tones to make his kitchen, opposite, a decorative setting for informal entertaining. It also is thoroughly practical, for everything is easily cleaned.

White kitchen is enlivened by an ingenious mingling of the cool and warm tones of the spectrum. Blue glass mosaic mural with colorful Italian larder motifs is echoed in striped curtains, orange bulletin board and blue tile floor, with subtle color in the all-over blue and green design on white plastic countertops. In the adjoining pantry, left, a bright blue wall with brass clock carries through the dominant color. Here, fold-away cooking units and a dishwasher provide a supplementary work area. The kitchen cooking center is separated from the dining area (used for after-theatre suppers) by a heat-resistant curved glass screen which blocks noise and cooking odors. The wood-and-marble-topped work cabinet, raised on legs to give lightness to the design, also acts as a buffet for informal parties. Cabinets and sinks by St. Charles. Refrigerator, dishwasher, cooking tops and built-in ovens by Frigidaire. Panelyte countertops by St. Regis. Amtico vinyl tile floor.

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source: House and Garden Magazine | February 1958

Any couple with three pre-school children is confronted with a vexing domestic problem: How, under one roof, does one supervise the children when necessary, let them alone when desirable and still enjoy the luxury of adult activities? The house shown here represents one artful solution. Essentially a simple, one-story rectangle, it is divided into three zones a children's area including three bedrooms and a combined play- room and kitchen center; a living-dining zone; and a master bedroom-study zone. Largely because it is so adeptly planned for family living this house recently won an important American Institute of Architecture award.