John Johansen's Bridge House, one of New Canaan's truly classic mid-century modern houses, is on the market for $5 million.
Johansen, of course, was one of the Harvard Five -- in fact he's the only one still alive (Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, Landis Gores and Marcel Breuer were the others).
The house, which is on Louise's Lane, a tiny dead-end road near the Pound Ridge border, is called the Bridge House because it spans the Rippowam River, a small stream the eventually drains into Long Island Sound. The Bridge House was built in 1956 and is still owned by the person who commissioned it.
There's surprisingly little about the Bridge House online, and I'll have to go to the library to refer to Bill Earls' Harvard Five book or Christian Bjone's First House book for more, but here's what the real estate listing (by Gillian DePalo, of the William Raveis agency) says:
The Bridge House ... is the culmination of a great modern architectural genius .... The house has expansive walls of glass & gorgeous sunlite rooms; both dramatic and intimate interior spaces, including the gold leaf barrel LR ceiling, the Star, Champagne, Egg and Hourglass Pavilions, and many signature designs executed personally by the architect...
It hasn't been shown on either of the Modern House Day tours I've participated in, and I'm fairly certain it wasn't on the 2001 tour that Gina worked on but I didn't. Johansen spoke at the 2004 and 2007 symposiums that preceded the tours and showed slides of it both times, so he's clearly proud of it. I wrote a long post about the tour and symposium and included much of what Johansen talked about, for my other blog; you can read it here.
Johansen, by the way, is 91 and lives in Dutchess County, New York, with his wife, Ati, who is Walter Gropius's daughter. -- ta
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