After a year of fundraising and negotiation, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) has bought the Modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s summer house near Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The deal closed last week, transferring ownership to the trust from Breuer’s son, Tomas. The building will now undergo careful renovations to preserve its original design, before opening up to host a residency programme for artists, architects and scholars.
“It’s been a long campaign, but together we have saved an important place from probable destruction,” a representative for the CCMHT said in a statement. “Work begins on the restoration immediately.”
Breuer started building the house in 1948, designing it to look “like a camera on a tripod” suspended in the surrounding landscape. “It’s a brilliant building and a prototype of Breuer’s vision of how he could marry the ethos of the Bauhaus with the traditions of the American summer cottage,” the Breuer expert Barry Bergdoll told The Art Newspaper last year. “It’s a type he repeated for a number of his friends, forming an informal colony in the woods of Wellfleet.” Breuer’s is one of about 100 Modernist houses in the area. The architect and his wife are buried next to its driveway.
The CCMHT, founded in 2007 by the architect and carpenter Peter McMahon, has already saved and restored four other Modernist houses on Cape Cod. These now host residencies and educational programming, as well as serving as rental properties so that visitors can experience them as they were intended for a week at a time. McMahon works on the houses himself, making necessary renovations and even building period-appropriate furniture.
Although Breuer’s house is not in the best condition, McMahon is thrilled that it has remained unchanged since the architect’s death in 1981—including the original furniture Breuer himself made, and a vast collection of books and art. As McMahon said last year: “It’s a treasure trove.”
