Adventures in the Modern House Real Estate Market

About a week ago I got an email from someone I don’t know and who only gave his initials but who has been looking to buy a modern house in the New Canaan area. The correspondence has been short and almost telegraphic but it’s been interesting in that it gives the immediate perspective of someone who wants to buy and seems to know what he’s doing.

The first email he sent me was about the Round House, in Wilton. Here’s the email, in its entirety:

HI: I've been doing a bit of research on this house and am trying to figure out why it hasn't sold. It looks stunning. Do you have any info above and beyond the broker's hyperbole?

Regards.

To which I responded (in its entirety):

I'm afraid I don't know anymore than I've written.

Apparently the warmth of my reply prompted him to write again. A couple of days ago I received this:

I was at the round house -- a broker took us there and it was BUTCHERED! A real travesty inside. Outside is still fantastic, but for some reason two foul homes are situated right behind it ….

Anyhow, we passed on it.

I replied:

bummer about the round house.

what about johansen's bridge house, on louise's lane

And he said:

our broker actually wanted us to see it today, but I didn't like the brochure -- didn't like the feel of it and the rooms weren't to our liking.

It's also $5M which is high...

Saw the Philip Johnson house [i.e. the Alice Ball House] today as well but were totally underwhelmed to say the least. …

It's very tough.......we are very particular.....any leads/ideas?

He also asked me about a house on Ponus Ridge Road, designed by Willis Mills, to which I responded:

I have a bit of info about that Mills house (I had to write a paragraph about it for the 2004 modern house day brochure …) . At the time I spoke to mills's son. Mills built it for himself and his family. When I saw it, in 2004, it was owned by the two guys who now own the hodgson house that johnson designed (across from the glass house); they might still own the mills house two. A good friend of mine redid all the cabinets in the kitchen of the mills house. It's nice enough although not my favorite among new canaan places.

… I guess if you're going to spend a few million dollars on a modern house, you'd better get what you want. But of course modern houses were all built to satisfy specific clients, so to buy one now, your wants have to match what the original client's wants were.

He responded:

to give you an idea about myself -- I bought a 1928 home in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles and fired all of my contractors redid the structural engineer's plans. This was the first house built on the Old Getty Museum mountain -- I took it back to perfection and every single exposed screw, hinge, knob etc. is period correct.

So I do not want to redo another house, but may have to. Having said that, I want something relatively easy to live in and clean modern lines etc.

As of yesterday, he said, he's working with Gillian DePalo of William Raveis and is optimistic. We'll see how it turns out. -- ta

A Visit to Johansen’s Bridge House

Purely by chance, I found myself inside John Johansen's Bridge House yesterday, receiving a condensed history of the house, from concept through materials, spending as much time as I wanted to poke around and ask questions.

Tom sent me on a reconnaissance mission to see if the house is visible from the road and to maybe get some photos. As luck would have it, yesterday was open-house day for area realtors, and even though I am not in the profession, Rita Kirby of William Pitt | Sotheby's International invited me to have a look around.

Rita explained how the owners (who are the original owners and still live in the house) asked Johansen not only design them a house, but also to find the land it would exist on. According to Rita, Johansen always had a river house "in him" to design, and this site presented the perfect opportunity to realize that idea. One of the more prescient and romantic concepts was that in crossing the water, one was purified and the concerns and distresses of the outside world were washed away, making his "Villa Ponte" truly a haven.

The house is an extended, slab-serif capital "H" (in typographic terms, extended means wider than normal, and a serif is the small line, curve, stroke, or slab projecting from the main stroke of a letter), the cross bar of the "H" being the living/dining area beneath the famous gold leaf multi-barrel ceiling, and under which flows the Rippowam River.

Each "slab serif" of the "H" is a wing, or pavilion, with a different purpose which is denoted by a unique symbol that Johansen designed which is pressed into the stucco walls, on both interior and exterior walls, in random-looking (by design) groupings: The children's wing has an egg shape, the parents' wing has an elongated 4-point star, the kitchen wing has a stylized hourglass, and the guest wing has open circles, representing champagne bubbles.

Predictably, the house has narrow hallways and rooms on the small side (with the exception of the exceptional living room), and to make best use of the small spaces, there's lots of clever built in storage throughout. Every room has a door and windows to the outside to let in the sound of the river and make the woods immediately accessible.

I noticed that Johansen also designed the garage. Must have been a lot later, since the feel is so different from the main house. It's not bad from the outside, but the inside is uninteresting.

I was not permitted to take photos, but there are plenty here. To give you a better idea of the configuration of the house, I scanned the outline with its measurements from the Wm. Pitt packet on the house. I was told that an actual floor plan will be up on the house's website in about a week. – GF