The Booth House, as shown in listing photos, shares many similarities with Philip Johnson’s Glass House, although it offers more privacy than the New Canaan property, built three years later.
Photo: OneKey
A few years before Philip Johnson designed the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, the modernist architect built the Booth House in Bedford, New York. Completed in 1946, it was Johnson’s first residential commission, and it shares many design features with its more famous successor — a low-slung structure in a woodland setting with expansive, floor-to-ceiling windows, and an open-floor plan broken up by a large, central brick fireplace. But while the Glass House is now a museum (and pristine), the Booth House, located at 319 Pound Ridge Road, just went up for sale, asking $1.9 million, and it is neither landmarked nor in meticulous condition.
“It needs a complete restoration — new windows, a new kitchen. It needs everything,” says Melissa Marcogliese, the Compass agent who has the listing. “But that’s really neither here nor there. The people who are coming to look at it are coming specifically because it was Philip Johnson’s first house. I had someone who runs a foundation come to look at it. I had someone call from Japan.”
The Bedford, NY, home, as shown in listing photos, requires renovation but retains original architectural elements like the brick fireplace that breaks up the open-floor plan.
Photo: OneKey
The house was built as a weekend home for Richard and Olga Booth, a Manhattan couple who rented it out in 1955 to two architects, Sirkka and Robert Damora. The Damoras were part of the modernist-architecture scene, and Robert, an architectural photographer, went on to photograph many well-known modernist homes in the Northeast. At the time they began living in it, Philip Johnson was not yet famous. “We were intrigued by it because it was a modern house and we were both in architecture,” Sirkka Damora told The Wall Street Journal in 2010. “We knew it was Philip Johnson’s house but the name didn’t mean much at the time.”
After the Damoras bought the house in the 1960s, they expanded its 1,450-square-foot, two-bedroom footprint without distorting the clean, modernist form of the Johnson design: digging down to add 900 feet below grade and putting up a separate 800-square-foot studio on the property that Robert used for architectural drafting. They went on to live in the house for five more decades, until 2010, when Sirkka, recently widowed, listed the house for $2 million. But it languished on the market — it was the recession, and the house needed work. Seven years later, the Damora family slashed the price to $1 million, putting out a plea to buyers who would appreciate its significance and restore it rather than tear it down — a fate that’s befallen many other modestly sized mid-century masterpieces. It finally sold in 2019 for $1.2 million to an LLC linked to Thomas Rom, a Manhattan art adviser, according to public records.
The house, as shown in listing photos, is located on a wooded, 1.6-acre parcel with an additional 800-square-foot studio. The property includes two other lots as well.
Photo: OneKey
Marcogliese said the owner, a group of investors, planned to restore the house and build another house on one of the two separate lots that come with the property. But then they decided to list it instead. The house sits on 1.6 acres, with two other buildable lots of 2.59 acres, bringing it to a total of 4.28 acres.
The hope is once again that a preservation-minded buyer will come along and restore the property, as recently happened with the Wolfhouse in Newburgh. “It’s very raw, but it’s still Philip Johnson,” says Marcogliese. “It’s rare.”
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