After a yr of fundraising and negotiation, the Cape Cod Fashionable Home Belief (CCMHT) has purchased the Modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s summer season home close to Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The deal closed final week, transferring possession to the belief from Breuer’s son, Tomas. The constructing will now bear cautious renovations to protect its authentic design, earlier than opening as much as host a residency programme for artists, architects and students.
“It’s been a protracted marketing campaign, however collectively we now have saved an vital place from possible destruction,” a consultant for the CCMHT mentioned in an announcement. “Work begins on the restoration instantly.”
Breuer began constructing the home in 1948, designing it to look “like a digital camera on a tripod” suspended within the surrounding panorama. “It’s a superb constructing and a prototype of Breuer’s imaginative and prescient of how he might marry the ethos of the Bauhaus with the traditions of the American summer season cottage,” the Breuer knowledgeable Barry Bergdoll instructed The Artwork Newspaper final yr. “It’s a sort he repeated for a variety of his mates, forming a casual colony within the woods of Wellfleet.” Breuer’s is one in all about 100 Modernist homes within the space. The architect and his spouse are buried subsequent to its driveway.
The CCMHT, based in 2007 by the architect and carpenter Peter McMahon, has already saved and restored 4 different Modernist homes on Cape Cod. These now host residencies and academic programming, in addition to serving as rental properties in order that guests can expertise them as they had been supposed for every week at a time. McMahon works on the homes himself, making crucial renovations and even constructing period-appropriate furnishings.
Though Breuer’s home will not be in the most effective situation, McMahon is thrilled that it has remained unchanged because the architect’s demise in 1981—together with the unique furnishings Breuer himself made, and an enormous assortment of books and artwork. As McMahon mentioned final yr: “It’s a treasure trove.”
