A Visit to an Alan Goldberg House

There's probably no limit to the number of ways you can choose an architect, but during a visit to a realtors open house in Bedford, New York, yesterday (we were invited by the listing broker, a friend who knows of our interest in modern houses), we heard this story about the house we were in:

The owner bought the land in the mid 1980s, five acres or so bordered on one side by a lake and on another by a ravine through which flows the outlet of the lake. He knew he wanted to build his family's house there but he wasn't sure what it should look like, so he began to flip through architecture books. When he came to one with pictures of houses designed by Eliot Noyes, he knew he had found what he wanted. So he made a phone call.

Unfortunately Noyes, whose firm was based in New Canaan and who was one of the Harvard Five, had been dead since 1977. However the person who took the call was the head of the Noyes firm's architecture division, Alan Goldberg. And it was Goldberg who ended up designing the house.

It's a bit big to fit my amorphous definition of a modern, and the roof is peaked rather than flat. The lake views are spectacular and it has a terrific interior gallery (shown here) with native stone walls that were beautiful and Noyes-esque. If you have almost $8 million and can pay almost 35 grand in property taxes a year, it's yours. The listing is here. -- ta

Alan Goldberg Variations

There are certain houses in New Canaan that we refer to as “move-in-tomorrow” houses – places where, when we visit, we look at each other and agree that it’s so right we could move in tomorrow. One of them is the house on Laurel Road that Alan Goldberg lives in. We were there for a cocktail party that preceded the New Canaan Historical Society’s 2004 Modern House Day and immediately felt as if it enveloped us in warmth and elegance (the picture on the far right of the second row, here, shows the interior of the house).

Goldberg worked for Eliot Noyes (whose own house, on Country Club Road, is also a move-in-tomorrow house), heading Noyes’s firm’s architecture division, where he was noted for designing Mobil gas stations (among many other things – check out this story, from New Canaan-Darien magazine to get an idea of the range of his interests).

This came to mind this morning when I came across an ad for a house on Frogtown Road that Goldberg designed. It’s big by modern standards – 4,300 square feet – and was built in 1982, which makes it a late-century modern, if there is such a thing. I’m not sure I’d call it a move-in-tomorrow house but it’s worth looking at, here. --TA