Saving Breuer's beloved home

In July 2024, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust completed its purchase of Marcel Breuer’s Wellfleet cottage, forever ensuring this important site will be protected and enjoyed. As restoration begins, decades of artifacts that document Breuer’s experimental approach are being revealed for the first time, and the Trust is looking for help from scholars, archivists, and donors.

The story of this home begins in the early 1940s when Breuer visited architect Serge Chermayeff’s cottage on Wellfleet’s Slough Pond. The remote setting captivated Breuer, who’d been interested in the restorative benefits of nature since his days at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Like many of the designers at the school, Breuer believed healthy living was achieved by creating harmony between the built world and natural environment.

In 1949, Breuer completed his own Wellfleet cottage, a simple structure that served as the prototype for his Long House plan—a rectangular box on posts. A cantilever screened porch juts out from the house “like a camera on a tripod,” said Breuer, to give the family a commanding view of the surrounding freshwater ponds. In 1961, he added an adjacent structure to serve as a studio, and in 1968, he expanded the home to include an apartment and darkroom for his son, Tamas.

The rooms are small and sparsely furnished with simple Breuer-built pieces that sit low to the ground. The furniture, like the house, was constantly in flux as Breuer experimented with different ways to experience the spaces. Known for his fascination with cinder blocks—ready-made Brutalist units of architecture that weren’t available in Europe—Breuer stacked the blocks to create pedestal tables for the dining area and porch, each topped with wood or a massive slab of stone.

Simple materials wearing the patina of weather and time add to the cottage’s informal feeling. Several walls are thick with layers of paint, resulting from Breuer’s fascination with the sensory and psychological effects of different colors, and their ability to influence perception and mood. And if those frequently repainted walls could talk, they’d share stories about the influential designers and artists who were frequent guests here, including Florence Knoll, the Saarinen family, Alexander Calder, Saul Steinberg, and many others.

The cottage is remote, quiet, simple, uninsulated, and when first built it had no electricity or running water. And yet, this is where Breuer was most at home and where he chose for his final resting place. On the property is a granite slab by sculptor Masayuki Nagare, playfully inscribed, “Here Marcel Breuer broke his knee entirely of his own stupidity.” Under that stone are the ashes of Marcel and his wife, Connie, as well as Connie’s sister Elizabeth Leighton and her husband Robert Wolff.

The Cape Cod Modern House Trust’s plan is to restore the property back to 1981, the last time Breuer was alive in the house. The residence has remained in the family since then and it was from Tamas Breuer that it was purchased. “We’re removing things added to the space over the last 40 years, like closets and Homasote wall panels, under which we found earlier layers of transitional materials, paint colors, and the original tatami floor mats,” says the Trust’s founder, Peter McMahon. “It’s a forensic study, and as we remove these things, more of Breuer’s work is revealed. We can see how he built the house and then continued to evolve it.”

Therein lies why saving this house is so special. It is a gift for future architects, historians, and designers to have the opportunity to stay here and study this influential architect’s work firsthand. Breuer was a valued mentor to many, including Florence Knoll shortly after she’d earned her architecture degree. Making this house available continues the conversation Breuer started about the virtues of experimentation, being surrounded by nature, living simply, and finding joy in an artistic community.