Stone's Mandell House

More than once over the past few months, while I was writing about Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, in New Canaan, I clicked through folder after folder in search of a couple of pictures I had taken of Stone's Mandel House, which is up the road from where I work in Bedford Hills. I couldn't find it and assumed it had been deleted during a computer-space crisis. But no -- I had hidden it away on a flash drive. I found it today:



I was aware of the house's location and knew it had been on the market for some time, so I drove up there one day, with camera. I clicked off a couple of shots and then drove the rest of the way up the driveway to the house, at which point I noticed that it was not unoccupied. So I left. So, as an editor once admonished me, when I publish the picture, I'm publishing the evidence of my trespass.

The house is truly of the International Style and was built in 1933. We used to think that our house, built in 1939, was the first modern in Westchester. We've realized many times over that we were wrong, of course. That honor might belong to the Mandell House. -- ta