The Marcel Breuer House II (labeled Breuer House, New Canaan I in his official papers; also known as the Breuer–Robeck House) is a two-story modernist house at 122 Sunset Hill Road in New Canaan, Connecticut, United States. Built in 1947, it was designed by architect Marcel Breuer as a home for his family. The cantilevered design, featuring glazing, wood, and stone finishes, helped bring attention to Breuer's fledgling architectural practice in New York City. The house was generally praised when it was completed, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Breuer family occupied the house for just four years, after which it was sold to opera singer Russell Roberts, who rented the property out. The Robeck family bought the house in 1964 and made several modifications over the next three decades, including a garage and a swimming pool. The Robecks also hired Breuer associate Herbert Beckhard to design a rear annex between 1985 and 1988. The house was sold in 1994 to John P. Horgan, who obtained a preservation easement on the property. It was resold to a limited liability company, 122 Sunset LLC, in 2022.
The house sits on a hillside within a estate, overlooking a meadow. The original house measures , while the annex measures . The lower level is recessed from the upper level, which, as built, was cantilevered from a set of cables at the roofline. The main living areas are placed on the upper level, with a central kitchen and dining area flanked by bedrooms to the south and a living room to the north. The lower or basement level contains secondary spaces such as a child's bedroom, workshop, and playroom. There are additional rooms in the annex.
Site The Marcel Breuer House II is located at 122 Sunset Hill Road in New Canaan, Connecticut. The site spans about . The house itself is separated from the street by a long, sloping meadow surrounded by trees, being located about west of the street and resting on a slope. Along the site's northern boundary, a tree-lined gravel driveway leads from Sunset Road, separating the house from its garage. The end of the driveway, a vehicular loop, overlooks the northeastern corner of the house, allowing visitors to see the eastern elevation more clearly. Other landscape features include a fence west of the lawn, a preexisting sycamore tree overlooking the eastern facade, and a Japanese maple at the end of the driveway. The grounds include more Japanese maples and some hemlocks.
The site has two outbuildings. Across the driveway north of the house is a wooden garage built in 1969, with a facade divided vertically into three bays that face the driveway. The garage has a concrete foundation slab, a gray wooden facade with a roll-down gate and horizontal windows, and a sloped wooden roof. East of the house is a swimming pool dating from 1971, which is built into the ground. Nearby sites include the Isaac Davis and Marion Dalton Hall House (25 Lambert Road) and Hanford Davenport House (353 Oenoke Ridge) to the northeast, as well as the New Canaan Nature Center and the Hampton Inn Building (179 Oenoke Ridge) to the east.
History The Hungarian-American architect Marcel Breuer (known as Lajkó, the diminutive of his middle name Lajos) emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1937. He built four houses for his family in the U.S., all of them in New England; his first and third houses were in Massachusetts, while his second and fourth houses were in Connecticut. His first home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was built in 1937 near the Gropius House, the residence of Breuer's Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius. In 1940, Breuer married Constance "Connie" Crocker Leighton, a secretary at Breuer and Gropius's practice; they had two children. Their first child, Tamas, was born before the Breuer House II was built in 1947, while his sister Francesca was not born until after they had moved out.
Development After practicing architecture in Massachusetts for nine years, Breuer relocated his office to New York City in 1946. Following several mishaps in which Tamas got lost in a Macy's store and pulled a fire alarm in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Breuer decided to build a house in the town of New Canaan, Connecticut, in the city's northeastern suburbs. Land was cheaper in New Canaan than in the city itself, and Breuer may have been more attracted to a suburban lifestyle—a factor in the development of his Lincoln residence, located on the outskirts of Boston. Eliot Noyes, a protege of Breuer's, had also recently built a house in the town, which was a major factor in the Breuer family's decision to move to that particular suburb. Connie reflected that, after a year of living in the city with their young son, "it was not difficult to conclude that what we desired most profoundly was space—all kinds of space, both indoors and out". In addition, Lajkó preferred to design smaller residences, even though his work at the time mainly consisted of larger corporate structures.
The specific site of the Breuer House II had previously been part of the Platt farm, which was resold several times in the 18th century before becoming part of the Child estate in 1893. The Breuer family obtained the site in May 1947; Connie wrote that Lajkó had selected the site because of its landscape, which consisted of a hillside between a meadow and a forest. The Breuer House II, the family's first residence in New Canaan, was designed to fit partially into the hillside at ground level. The main story, the upper level, was laid out with bedrooms separated from communal family areas. Because Lajkó was designing the house solely for himself and his family, he took the opportunity to experiment with the design. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian homes, he decided to experiment with cantilevered construction. The compact nature of the house was also influenced to some extent by the Breuers' limited budget.
A local contractor, Irving Wood, built the Breuer House II during mid-1947. That August, Lajkó left for South America, where he was attempting to pursue commissions. Noyes and another member of Breuer's team, Harry Seidler, oversaw the completion of the house. Just as Connie was about to move in, Noyes and Seidler noticed that the cantilevers were sagging; Lajkó had misjudged the forces on the cables, necessitating their replacement. One of Lajkó's friends, the Brooklyn architect Nick Farkas, provided recommendations for fixing the cantilevers. In response to a letter from Breuer that September, expressing concerns about the cables, Noyes wrote that the design "looks very exciting". Noyes was so confident in the revised design that he had removed the temporary supports that held up the porches.
Breuer use When the building was finished in October 1947, temporary supports had to be reinstalled under the porches after they started sagging again; the house had cost $17,300 in total (). After the house's construction, other modernist architects also designed their houses there; Philip Johnson, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's architecture department, said he decided to move there specifically because of Breuer and Noyes. Breuer became part of the Harvard Five group of architects who lived in the town, along with Noyes, Johnson, John M. Johansen, and Landis Gores. The unusual design was profiled in architectural publications. In addition, it was featured as a stop on New Canaan's first tour of modern houses in 1949, which attracted 1,100 observers who paid a fee to see the houses. Though architecture students often dropped by the house uninvited, the Breuers were happy to accommodate them.
When Lajkó was designing the Stillman House in 1950, he invited Rufus and Leslie Stillman over to discuss the design; Rufus reportedly said "That's the house I want built for us" when he first saw the Breuer House II. The architect I. M. Pei, a good friend of Lajkó's, said that the house often hosted parties, to which Breuer's European friends were invited. Meanwhile, the sagging of the cantilevers worsened rapidly. Pei recalled that the building was "a delightful house, but always bouncy", while the sculptor Alexander Calder had to be reminded by his wife, "Don't conga on the cantilever!" Breuer installed a retaining wall under the cantilevered section in 1951. Issues with leaking roofs and cracked walls had arisen during the 1940s not long after the house was completed, and continued into the next decade.
Later use In 1951, the Breuers moved into their second New Canaan house, the Breuer House IV. The new house was a brick and fieldstone structure built into the landscape, and, because of the structural issues with the Breuer House II, lacked overhanging sections. The Breuer House II's second owner, the opera singer Russell Roberts, acquired it that April for $40,000 (). Roberts rented out the house for a decade, and during this time, round columns and posts were placed underneath the house to support it. Peter and Gertrude Robeck, a family from California who were looking to renovate a house of their own, rented the house starting in 1962 after hearing about it in a brochure. Initially, the Robeck family was skeptical about the house's modern architecture. Peter Robeck recalled realizing that the family "were madly in love with this place" after looking at a hemlock tree on the site. Roberts began looking to sell the house by 1963, and the house was sold in September 1964 to the Robeck family, who paid $54,000 ().
The Robeck family ultimately owned the house for three decades. During this time, they made several changes to the site; for example, in the 1960s, the Robeck family paid $70,000 for several mature trees that they then planted around the site. The family also added the garage in 1969 and the swimming pool two years later. Over the years, the Robeck family sought to expand the house, finding the layout unintuitive and the rooms cramped. Herbert Beckhard, one of Breuer's proteges, was hired to construct the rear annex between 1985 and 1988. The addition was largely set back from the original house and cannot be seen from nearby. As part of the expansion, Beckhard enlarged or added some rooms, removed some walls, and relocated an interior stair. In addition, a fieldstone cladding and larger windows were added to the lower level facade, and Beckhard may have replaced the brises-soleil shading the upper-story windows. The annex originally had perforations surrounding an apple tree; the perforations were infilled when the tree was cut down in the 1990s.
In 1994, John P. Horgan bought the house from the Robeck family. Horgan, a venture capital investor, paid $1.1 million for what he later described as "my little gray shack". The Marcel Breuer House II was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. The next year, amid the then-recent demolitions of several modernist houses in New Canaan, Horgan obtained a preservation easement for the house. The easement, which was given to preservation group Historic New England, legally prohibited any current or future owners of the Breuer–Robeck House from demolishing it. The house was sold in 2022 to a limited liability company, 122 Sunset LLC. The company, which paid $2.75 million for the house, made the purchase on behalf of Brian and Sharon Libman.
Architecture