{"id":306879,"date":"2025-11-22T10:25:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T10:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/306879\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T10:25:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T10:25:25","slug":"how-marcel-breuers-cape-cod-cottage-was-brought-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/306879\/","title":{"rendered":"How Marcel Breuer\u2019s Cape Cod cottage was brought back to life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tReal Estate\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Cape Cod Modern House Trust purchased the architect\u2019s decaying 1949 house and restored it to its former glory.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\tMarcel Breuer, his wife Constance, and other artists and scholars gather at Breuer’s Wellfleet house in the late 1960s. Tamas Breuer \t<\/p>\n

For decades, the Wellfleet<\/a> home of Hungarian-born modernist architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer<\/a> (1901-1981) sat empty, its contents and structure falling into disrepair. Peter McMahon, an architect and founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust <\/a>(CCMHT), found it almost painful to sit idly while a piece of modernist history decayed \u2014 and then Breuer\u2019s son, Tamas, decided to sell the place.<\/p>\n

McMahon seized his chance to restore the renowned Bauhaus designer\u2019s 1949 house to its former glory. He approached Tamas Breuer with a deal: Would he wait one year to put the house on the market so the trust could raise enough money to buy it? Tamas Breuer, who planned to list the property for $2 million, agreed. Within a year, the trust fund-raised the necessary $2 million to acquire the home in 2024<\/a>, and then borrowed an additional $700,000 to renovate it.<\/p>\n

\"The deck at Marcel Breuer\u2019s former Wellfleet home after the restoration. \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

The CCMHT was founded<\/a> in 2007 with the goal of restoring the Outer Cape\u2019s impressive modern homes. In the 1940s, artists, designers, academics, architects, and other avant-garde thinkers began flocking to Wellfleet<\/a>, building or hiring architects to create cottages to spend the summer.<\/p>\n

Those sleek homes are now valuable pieces of the Cape\u2019s modernist design history. McMahon has leased four mid-century houses from the National Park Service (The Kugel\/Gips House, The Hatch House, The Weidlinger House, and The Kohlberg House) since they sit on the National Park Service\u2019s Cape Cod National Seashore<\/a> land. Though the organization carefully renovated \u2014 and maintains \u2014 the buildings, the trust had never outright owned any of its homes until this recent purchase.<\/p>\n

\"\"The living room in Marcel Breuer\u2019s former Wellfleet home after the restoration. \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

Breuer was a member of The Harvard Five<\/a>, a group of Bauhaus architects who started a contemporary movement in New Canaan, Conn. Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes were also in the group.<\/p>\n

Breuer\u2019s Wellfleet house \u2014 which sits across from architect Serge Chermayeff\u2019s 1954 summer cottage \u2014 is considered one of the designer\u2019s two main prototypes: a Long House. Breuer House I<\/a>, designed for his family in New Canaan, is also a Long House as it\u2019s a \u201clong wooden box elevated on a masonry base,\u201d explained McMahon. The other prototype is the Binuclear<\/a> \u2014 a house on the ground with two wings.<\/p>\n

\"Marcel Breuer, architect for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, in 1966. \u2013 AP Photo\/John Lindsay<\/p>\n

The Wellfleet house resembles an elevated wooden cabin and was inspired by New England-style cottages and oyster houses. The structure is surrounded by a little over 4 unspoiled acres and offers frontage on three ponds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s way back in the woods, but it was kind of the epicenter of the modernist experimenters,\u201d McMahon explained. Breuer spent every summer at the home until he died in 1981, and his ashes are buried in front of it.<\/p>\n

When the trust acquired the home, it hadn\u2019t been maintained for roughly 30 years. \u201cIt was really in a state of extreme dilapidation and parts of it were uninsulated,\u201d said McMahon.<\/p>\n

\"The Wellfleet home of modernist architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer had fallen into disrepair. \u2013 Peter McMahon
\n\" \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

The team had to bring the house up to present-day building code by adding smoke alarms, building railings where there was previously an open platform with a 7-foot drop, inserting steel reinforcements into parts of the floor near the sagging porch, and adding all-new siding, windows, plumbing, and electrical systems.<\/p>\n

As part of the historically accurate renovations, the walls, made of a recycled paper and wax material called Homasote<\/a>, were freshly painted white, and the floors were restained black, revealing an influence of Japanese design. Other materials were sourced to be as close to the original as possible. Some of the bathroom walls, for example, were covered in a light grey sheet laminate called Marlite<\/a>, and the team discovered it\u2019s still being manufactured in exactly the same color.<\/p>\n

\"A hole in the ceiling was one of many repairs. \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

McMahon pointed out that each section of the house is elevated off the ground, and its roof slopes upward. \u201cYou have this feeling that you\u2019re floating,\u201d McMahon said. \u201cIt\u2019s right on the edge of this drop, so you get this amazing feeling that you\u2019re projected out over the treetops and over the pond. The moves are very simple and amazingly effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

The purchase of the Long House came with many of its contents, including homemade Brutalist furniture Breuer designed for the house, a vast photo collection<\/a> by Tamas Breuer, and an art collection with works by Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, and other artists whom Breuer had befriended from art schools such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. During negotiations, McMahon also secured an Alexander Calder painting and a self-portrait Breuer did when he was 17 that had never been seen by scholars.<\/p>\n

\"The porch renovation included building railings where there was previously an open platform with a 7-foot drop. \u2013 Peter McMahon
\n\"Marcel Breuer\u2019s former Wellfleet home after the restoration. \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

The only problem: most of the art was stuck to the wall with thumbtacks. \u201cThere were mold issues and there were silverfish, which had eaten some of the paper,\u201d McMahon said. Like the rest of the house, its contents required careful conservation and restoration.<\/p>\n

By summer 2025, renovations wrapped up on the home, and it debuted to the public at an open house in September. Like the other homes managed by the CCMHT, it\u2019s available to rent <\/a>during summer months, and hosts artists in residence outside of peak season. Tours of the cottages<\/a> are also offered several times per year. It\u2019s all part of McMahon\u2019s vision to allow the homes to be experienced, rather than turning them into museums.<\/p>\n

Today, the Breuer house appears almost as it did in the 1950s and \u201860s, with spare furnishings, floor-to-ceiling windows, original art and reproductions, and period light fixtures.<\/p>\n

\"Before: The bedroom in Marcel Breuer\u2019s Wellfleet home pre-restoration. \u2013 Peter McMahon
\n\"After: The bedroom in Marcel Breuer\u2019s former Wellfleet home post-restoration. \u2013 Peter McMahon<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always liked Breuer, but I have a whole new level of respect for him after restoring his house, because the house was in such bad shape and so full of junk that you really couldn\u2019t tell what it was. You couldn\u2019t perceive the spaces,\u201d McMahon said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when it\u2019s all back the way it\u2019s supposed to be and the spaces are legible, you see there\u2019s this incredible genius of how he took these very simple shapes and organized them along this ridge \u2014 over a pond, over a very steep drop, to maximal effect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Real Estate The Cape Cod Modern House Trust purchased the architect\u2019s decaying 1949 house and restored it to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-306879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}