Tasteful Friends: Dave Brubeck's 1960s Japanese inspired Connecticut home and Zen gardens.

Boring. Also how do people keep the house warm in winter when it's all around glass.

Stupid Farnsworth House knock off.

The kitchen is a little austere, but the whole house is gorgeous. Your link OP, is just to the intro of, "Take Five", but no house link, so here it is:

I love this place. Wish there were better pics of the baths and bedrooms. My only critique is I am not a huge fan of the rough rock, sweeping interior staircase. The rest is perfection, including the grounds.

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It's pretty... period but I like a lot about it. It would be really interesting to see what a designer could do to respect the building while creating a liveable home that didn't feel like a museum piece. Am no more a fan of this than hard core Colonial, where the house dictates everything down to the frills on the curtains. Still, I think it's a great house.

It’s beautiful to look at but I wouldn’t want to live in it. In fact, it doesn’t look like anyone does.

That's not a house, it's a concept. An intellectual construct.

It is kind of beautiful in a very austere way, but damn it must cost a fortune to heat up in Connecticut with all that glass

Worth preserving as an interesting period piece but I couldnt live in it

[quote]It’s beautiful to look at but I wouldn’t want to live in it. In fact, it doesn’t look like anyone does.

The article says that the children were keeping the house since his death but not living there. That's why so much of it is original.

Re: heating costs. It's possible it was primarily a summer residence. He became extremely wealthy and probably had more than one residence. This is all speculation though.

Re: heating costs. It's possible it was primarily a summer residence. He became extremely wealthy and probably had more than one residence. This is all speculation though.

I love the Japanese style.

The two 2-story spaces and the dining room are all very nice, though I agree with R3 that the rock faced wall along the stair seems heavy and off mark, and the curve of the stair isn't very elegant either. A simpler. more transparent stair in a straight run would have been better.

For me, two key pleasures of a modern house are walls of glass but also large walls for hanging large, bold art. This house seems really short on walls on which to hang pictures of any scale.

The lesser rooms are ordinary, and the gardens are a bit gimmicky.

The Daily Mail website demands that I turn off my AdBlock or or white list the site… so I don't look at DM content.

Fukkum in their English arses.

I guess I’m in the minority, but I love that staircase. It’s a true original. And the grounds look pretty as well.

I looked at the sales listing photos and hate the stone stairs even more. It's huge and ugly.

On the gardens I came around though, the Blue Willow china pattern bridge and the pond and island is a bit kitschy, but the gardens that the large windows in the main rooms look onto are very nice. See photos 9 and 31. The bedrooms—all 8 of them—look a bit dated, as do the bathrooms, but some minor cosmetic rather than more substantive changes could make a huge improvement.

It's a big house: 6252 square feet. And it looks impressive in the night photos.

Was the stone quarried on site?

That house wouldn’t work in the South unless all the glass was converted to electrochromic, or smart glass. Even so, it’d likely cost a fortune to cool.

I thought I'd walked in on Mike and Carol Brady fucking.

Looks like a pretentious dream house of a NYer with too much money to send on stupid architecture.

R20 hope you get that McMansion of your dreams, R20. Planning on chintz and decoupage decor?

Looks like a psychiatrist or successful dentist's house of that period. A pretentious "artistic soul" with money. It would be better mucked up like a family lived there. A 60s and 70s family with pets. Do they board up those windows in the winter, or just throw money at heating it enough so the pipes don't freeze?

Fabulous. I'm paying no attention to the philistines on the thread who would modernize this masterpiece with fucking shiplap or whatever.

I love it long time.

I love this place. I admire the Japanese aesthetic and believe in keeping wall decoration to a minimum. I’d update the kitchen, but that’s about it. The gardens are exquisite.

"The gardens". Sheesh. It's not Winterthur.

I would warm it up with some rugs and textiles . Hang some art and plants,a few cozy seating groups .It would transform this cold (yet beautiful) space . Those views are fantastic.

It is precisely the type and style of home I have zero appreciation for. As a matter of fact I hate it. It looks like elderly wealthy Jewish intellectuals built it and never changed a thing. I suspect gigantic metal abstract sculptures mar the outdoor areas. Hard pass.

FF-ing the anti-Semite @ R28

I love it.

It’s no Richard Neutra home..now his are gorgeous

R7: A lot of his music was "an intellectual concept" which was a critique of "west coast" and college boy jazz, in general---not without merit.. "Take Five" was a rare example where that translated into something that became timeless.

The house seems like Japanese by way of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was influenced by Japan, too, but this seems closer to him despite the flourishes like the music room. The gardens are only somewhat Japanese---real Japanese gardens envelop you--the usual bridges, red lacquer and cliche plants are US touches---the real thing involves very small but visually complex spaces. The pseudo-Japanese entry way from the street seems tacky.

The field stone is 50s thing and was often over used in private homes and businesses, often to provide a contrast to mid century minimalism. It seems a little heavy handed here. A little stone goes a long way.

All this glass can be a challenge to air condition even with the ample shade.

Philip Johnson was a huge influence in Connecticut in terms of mid century modern home architecture.

R31 - I totally agree. Richard Neutra is an icon and always will be for good reason. Of course, he was both a very talented and exacting architect. Beverley David Thorne certainly did well for himself but can hardly be considered as being the same level of architect. The majority of Neutra's homes were somewhat modestly scaled by today's McMansion standards and were executed tastefully and scaled perfectly for his particular design aesthetic. I believe his largest residential home design was built in Palos Verdes and while stunning was still only about half this size. Neutra knew the need for balance, scale and making the most of a building site. This home has its good points (walls of glass, soaring ceilings in some rooms, attractive exteriors - the rear facade in particular) but to me it comes off as a very juvenile knock-off of a style created and perfected by actually talented architects. The "fantasy" elements don't work here. The horrible stone staircase has the shape and form of something designed to live in an outdoor garden terrace or a set for Nosferatu. It clashes with the overall architecture. The stone material itself could have worked - but the oversized cartoonish scale and swooping curlicue form make it an eyesore in this context. The rest of the house is choppy and ant-farm-ish for the most part - neither great nor bad but rather just OK. The grounds are beautiful for the most part - minus the tacky "Oriental" flourishes. Everything needs scrubbing and updating; a spare $1 million or so could right most wrongs here. Still that massive, tacky, castle-like stone staircase is there to stay.

You have to look at this house in the context of 1963. For the era it would have been spectacular. The exterior looks very Philip Johnson. It looks like something you would expect for someone in the arts, a wealthy creative intellectual.

The red bridge and red accents outside are completely different from the style inside. It looks like a cheesy Benihana recreation.

I would by the place for the grounds. For me the house would be a tear down. Nice for 1963 but not for today.