
It was later owned by late businessman Gene Klein and, in the 1980s, by Barry Manilow. The one-of-a-kind property is listed with Rick Distel at Compass.After Kaufmann died in 1955, his dazzling desert retreat, originally designed to be occupied just two months per year, stood vacant for a number of years. (Rand, in fact, lived for a period in a now-demolished villa Neutra built in the San Fernando Valley, in 1935, for director Josef von Sternberg.) When Neutra was informed of Rand’s tribute, he said, “I don’t know where she got her political ideas, but it’s obvious she used me as the model for Howard Roark’s sexuality.” In addition to his architecture savvy, Neutra clearly had a sense of humor, too. (They didn’t want his help.) The hero of Ayn Rand’s young adult novel, “The Fountainhead,” is also said to have been based on Neutra, who was a happily married family man with three sons. Neutra clearly had more than one trick up his sleeve, and he lived a life more complex than is commonly known.īorn into a wealthy family in Vienna in 1892, Neutra served in the First World War, and in 1932 he attempted to move to the Soviet Union to assist in designing housing for workers. (Singleton House is currently owned by French businessman Francois Pinault, who bought it in late 2012 for $16.5 million from the estate of hair care mogul Vidal Sassoon.) In fact, the houses have distinctly different personalities: Singleton House is all about the pool and the spectacular views, while Glen House is very much a place in the country. Glen House is often described as the sibling of the renowned Singleton House, which Neutra was concurrently building in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Today, the kitchen is a place for display, preparation and culinary performance.

During the ‘60s, they were considered places to conceal, store, and support things. Opening up the room in this way is reflective of the way social attitudes about kitchens have changed. Here, Joeb Moore + Partners replaced a partition with a pair of stainless steel columns.

The area calling for the most significant update, however, was the kitchen. Their goal wasn’t to make the house resemble the one the Glen family moved into in 1960 rather, they instituted careful interventions based on Neutra’s original vision of the house prior to budget restraints as well as special requests made by the Glen family.Ĭhanges to the house include a master bedroom that’s been enlarged to include a dressing room and an expanded bath with soaking tub. When the current owners purchased the property in 2005 it was badly in need of restoration, so they collaborated with Joeb Moore + Partners on an extensive restoration and redesign. Rigorously geometric, yet fluid and filled with light, it’s a sleek, simple residence, with a color palette of white, warmly toned wood, and steel. And, although it feels like the country, it’s just a 50-minute train ride from Manhattan.Ī leading proponent of the International Style, Neutra believed in multi-functional spaces that are flexible, adaptable, and easily modified for any kind of life, and the Glen house definitely fills that bill. Featuring an abundance of floor-to-ceiling windows, the house is oriented to the surrounding landscape as if nature were a Broadway show this is a house that encourages occupants to look outdoors. One of only three residences Neutra completed in Connecticut, the roughly 4,000-square-foot residence presides over a heavily wooded 2.41-acre lot with four bedrooms and 3.5 baths.

This makes the availability of Glen House something of an event.

People tend to think of Neutra as a stern modernist, but in fact, he was a romantic who “felt a desperate commitment to the art,” said architect Joseph Hansen, who worked with him during the ‘60s.įifty years after Neutra’s death, many people still feel the pull of the romance of modernist architecture, but only the lucky few get an opportunity to actually live with it.
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in 1960, the designer camped out on the site under a full moon. In preparing to design Glen House, which maverick architect Richard Neutra completed in Stamford, Conn.
