People associate the Cape Cod style house with this region, but in the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals commissioned the building of Bauhaus summer homes on the lower Cape, especially in Wellfleet and to a lesser extent, Truro.
Woods Hole has a Prairie School structure, the Harold C. Bradley House, designed by Purcell & Elmslie in 1911, but the stunning collection of post-Modernist homes on the lower and outer Cape, most of which are privately owned, were designed in the 1940’s and 1950’s by Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, Paul Weidlinger and local architects like Nathaniel Saltonstall and Oliver P. Morton.
This community was started by Jack Philips, an “acolyte” of Walter Gropius and heir to a substantial tract of coastal land. Philips sold lots to his colleagues from MIT and Harvard with the idea of creating a vacation enclave for relaxation, conversation and enjoyment of the Cape landscape.
Even more stunning than the views from these houses is the appreciation in their value. Then, land was cheap, $1,000 an acre. The houses were also pretty inexpensive to build: they are boxy, flat-roofed structures on slabs or stilts, constructed with recycled materials and sited on unlandscaped lots.
One such house is currently on the market. The asking price is $3,299,000.
For a splendid and fascinating history of the Cape’s modernist architecture, please visit Modern Cape Cod.
The title of this post is taken from the first two lines of Tom Jobim’s elegant composition “