By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: May 25, 2008
NEW CANAAN, Conn.
Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Cristina Ross owns a Philip Johnson house in New Canaan, Conn., that she is thinking of demolishing.
FOR $3.1 million in New Canaan, you can get a middling, multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction but sufficient grandeur to assuage your distress at not living quite as well as your hedge-fund-managing neighbors who paid twice as much.
Or you could get a house by Philip Johnson, the most celebrated American architect of the last half-century. It’s not just any Philip Johnson house, either: it’s one that a preservationist called “a livable version of the Glass House,” Johnson’s New Canaan home, a temple of transparency that opened to the public last year and now draws worshipful hordes daily to bask within the glory of high modernism.
But who actually wants to buy, let alone live in, a Philip Johnson house, particularly one that, at 1,773 square feet, might make a nice walk-in closet for the chateau down the lane?
Nobody in New Canaan, so far, at least not at that price.
And so not three miles from the Glass House, on one of New Canaan’s most estate-studded thoroughfares, the austere glass-and-concrete confection that Johnson called his “little jewel box,” built in 1953 for Alice Ball, a single woman with apparent passions for pink stucco and ruthless spatial efficiency, faces the prospect of demolition.
The Alice Ball House’s owner, an architect and developer, Cristina Ross, decided a few years ago that the building would make a worthy pool house for a much more au courant dwelling to be built at the back of the property. But that move was blocked, first by the town, which has since been mollified, and now by the neighbors to the rear, who have not.
Ms. Ross says that if she is unable to add her vision (“an English country house in the style of Lutyens”) to Johnson’s, or if she cannot find a buyer for the existing structure, she might just knock down the Ball house and build a New Canaan-style paean to maximalism atop its minimalist ruins.
This would not be an unprecedented development in New Canaan, a suburb forever of two minds about its place as epicenter and laboratory of the International Style: about two dozen of the 90-odd modernist dwellings built in New Canaan by Johnson and a group of fellow modernists known as the Harvard Five have been torn down in favor of buildings that cast more shadow on the landscape. This would be the first Johnson house to fall.
“It’s basically an option,” said Ms. Ross, who has the demolition permit to prove it. “Investment in property is only worth what you can get out of it.”
Ms. Ross, who lives in a five-bedroom colonial elsewhere in New Canaan, had her office in the Ball house for a while and now rents it out while it sits on the market. By her count, there have been at least a dozen prospective buyers in the last year, and a Finnish fashion shoot and a 50th birthday party for an architect, but there have been no takers.
The fact that such an architectural trophy has gone unbought for a year speaks less about any ambivalence for modernism, or even a softness in local property values, than about the domestic expectations of the superprivileged. “No one builds with less than five bedrooms now,” said Prudy Parris, Ms. Ross’s real estate agent. “People with no kids or one kid want five bedrooms.”
Christopher Wigren, the deputy director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, made the same point in an interview with the online edition of Preservation magazine: “People in a position to pay $3 million for a house want more than a galley kitchen.”
A tour of the Alice Ball House does not take long. Other than the living room, which measures 26 by 23 feet and seems (barely) enclosed, within more glass than wall, the rooms are shockingly small. A king-size bed nearly fills one of the two bedrooms (there is a third bedroom in an adjoining guest house, added later). The kitchen, while nicely appointed, would not look out of place on a houseboat.
“This is a space that has to be experienced directly,” said Gregory Farmer, a preservationist at the Connecticut trust, which lists the Ball house as one of the state’s most threatened treasures, “a space that’s experienced at a very personal level rather than something that’s very impressive to someone passing by on the street. Driving by, it looks like nothing.”
This is particularly the case on the road called Oenoke Ridge, one of New Canaan’s best addresses. Directly across the street from the Ball house, an 18,000-square-foot Tudor palace known as Wexford Hall is on the market for $13.9 million. All along the ridge top, monuments to architectural excess, not to say the killings made on Wall Street in recent years, echo across rolling lawns. The Ball house, now finished in beige rather than pink, sits close to the road and presents as a tan-and-glass shoebox.
Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Preservationists want to save the 1,773-square-foot house.
Ms. Ross’s plan to build a second house on the 2.2-acre property for resale ran afoul of the town environmental commission, which denied her permission to pave about 3,000 square feet of wetlands for a driveway and parking area. She scaled back the plan and won the town’s approval. But meanwhile, her neighbors to the rear, a retired investment banker and his wife, had signed on as secondary defendants in a suit Ms. Ross filed against the environmental commission, and they will not let the matter drop.
“We think it’s a capitulation on the wetlands issue,” said Linda Powell, the retired banker’s wife, adding that for what it’s worth, “building a columned colonial Italianate home in the back is not what we would consider preserving the Philip Johnson house.”
Some fans of New Canaan’s modernist heritage have taken it upon themselves to find a buyer. Jack Trifero, head of the New Canaan Village Association, the town’s chamber of commerce, buttonholes strangers and acquaintances in front of his Gramophone video store on Main Street and presses into their hands a flyer bearing a picture of the Johnson building and the plea “Save This House.”
“I’ll see somebody I know in the arts and say, ‘Mr. Smith, I can see you in this house,’ ” Mr. Trifero said. Some people express interest, he said, while others “just don’t understand why a house like that would be valuable.”
Even some modernist partisans say the price seems high. Ms. Ross bought the house for $1.5 million only three years ago, and says she has overhauled “all major systems: roofs, walls, woodwork, plaster, stonework.” But Helen Higgins, the executive director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, said, “There haven’t been enough improvements to suggest that the value is doubled.”
Ms. Ross’s hopes, though, have been buoyed by two recent sales. A quarter-mile up Oenoke Ridge, a crazy-looking 1958 pyramid-topped house by Edward Durell Stone, architect of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, just sold for $4.1 million, though it is more than twice the size of the Ball House. And on May 14, the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Calif., designed by Richard Neutra, sold at auction for $16.8 million.
The math on the Alice Ball house works out to $1,750 a square foot, ignoring for the moment the value of land, which is of course considerable. That’s about triple the average price per square foot of houses that sold in New Canaan in the last few weeks, on lots that average the same size, according to statistics from a local brokerage, Barbara Cleary’s Realty Guild.
Ms. Ross said she would sooner knock the house down than lower her price.
“The bottom line,” she said, “is that if there’s a buyer out there, great. If there isn’t, then I’ve done my due diligence.”
If Ms. Ross does decide to take down the Ball house, she has plans for demolition day.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said.
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