The Boys on the Hill

This article appers in the July/August 2015 issue of Departures. For more photos follow this link to the November 19 Stillman House auction at Wright.

When driving in Connecticut among the grand white historic homes on Litchfield’s North Street, only the leafblowers and the late-model cars clue you in that it’s not the mid-1800s. But turn down a narrow lane and the 19th century is swiftly replaced by the middle of the 20th with two flat roofed-houses nestled low into a green slope and painted pale colors in deference to their high street neighbors.

In 1949 Rufus Stillman, president and CEO of nearby Torin Manufacturing Company, saw the now-famous house that Marcel Breuer created in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and
decided that his family of five had to have a Breuer, too. Breuer would design four projects, referred to as Stillman I, II, and III, as well as a cottage, for the family—all in Litchfield—along with close to a dozen buildings for Torin. Stillman also seeded the town with work by Breuer’s colleagues: the house next door to Stillman I was designed by John M. Johansen, a former student, in 1953 for the Huvelle family. (Stillman had sold the land to friends with the caveat that they had to build modern.)

Stillman was obsessed with modern living. So too are Joseph Mazzaferro and Ken Sena. The couple, who have no architecture background, first came to Litchfield in 2003 to look at a $300,000 listing for a Breuer house. It turned out the realtor’s ad was missing a zero. But the next year, they got a second chance, snapping up the last house Stillman built with Breuer in 1973 – the 800-square-foot Rufus Stillman Cottage.

While living at the cottage, the couple became fascinated with its history and began the journey to become experts in all things Breuer. “We had some questions, and talked to Breuer scholars, and one of them said, “Why don’t you call Rufus?” says Sena, a financial analyst. So they visited him while he was living at Stillman I, and he and “the boys on the hill,” as he called them, became friends. When he died in 2009, “we were really scared someone would come for the land,” says Mazzaferro, and tear down the house. After some back and forth, the boys bought Stillman I. When the Huvelle family put their house on the market, the only offer they got was from someone who wanted to tear that down as well. Two years later, Mazzafero and Sena bought that one too. “Stillman became addicted to the architecture,” says Sena. “We got the same bite.”

The couple spent four years doing renovations, dividing responsibilities roughly along professional lines. Sena, a research analyst, handles the archival info and reconstruction planning, while Sena, a creative director in advertising, deals with interiors, finishes, and furniture. The curbside façade of the Stillman house is mostly blank, with high ribbon windows and a jaunty cable-stayed canopy over the front door. The house’s lack of pomp caused locals to nickname it “the chicken coop.” Around the back, under the large windows, panels in four bold colors pop. One of Breuer’s signature floating staircases reaches down to the pool. A mural by friend and neighbor Alexander Calder adds a surreal landscape to the rural ensemble.

The house is now (mostly) as Breuer left it in the mid-1950s, from the charcoal ceilings to the black-and-white Xanti Schawinsky sound-wave murals on the fireplace. Mazzaferro and Sena tore off later additions of a study and a screened porch, restored the exterior’s colored panels, removed an orange ceiling, and entirely repainted the murals. “We wanted to get back to clean,” says Mazzaferro. “We kept going back to the photos of when the house was first built.” It might seem strange to reduce square footage, but, he adds, “what makes these houses so livable is they give you what you need, which is being connected with the outdoors.”

They consulted the Breuer archives and spoke to scholars and Breuer’s still-living associates to reconstruct the original footprint, materials and finishes. The blue paint for the rear façade had to be ordered from Europe—American blues didn’t reflect light in quite the same way. They took down the water-damaged poolside wall and rebuilt it, tracing the original Calder design and repainting it with the permission of the artists’ estate. They spotted the Schawinsky designs in a vintage copy of Interiors magazine (a previous owner had painted over them), using the images to replace them faithfully.

They did change a few things. “You have to draw the line somewhere,” says Mazzaferro. “We were not trying to create a time capsule.” Where Stillman I had bare concrete floors downstairs, the couple added slate, copying the paving pattern from elsewhere in the house. When the Stillman children slept there, the concrete was covered with Calder-designed rugs, latch-hooked by their parents. One of these is now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. They put white Corian countertops and new appliances in the kitchen, but kept the black, white and wood palette in the bathrooms. Their efforts on the two houses earned them a prestigious Citation of Merit from the DOCOMOMO organization in 2014, the first ever for a residential project.

Along the way, Mazzaferro and Sena learned so much about Breuer that they are currently constructing a Breuer-designed addition to the cottage, as well as renovating Breuer’s house for designer Vera Neumann, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Mazzaferro studied fine arts at New York’s Pratt Institute, where he remembers Johansen, then a professor in the architecture department, walking around “like a Jedi master.” For Sena, “this is an opportunity to train under a very gifted architect.” Now he has architect dreams himself: “At some point in the future I would love to design my own house.”

Modernists Make Good Neighbors
When Joseph Mazzaferro and Ken Sena bought the adjacent 1953 Huvelle house, by John M. Johansen—which has since been sold for $1.6 million—it was in much better shape than Stillman I, having never left the original owners’ hands. “They never changed anything until they had to,” says Mazzaferro. The major work was exterior, reconstructing the cantilevered porch and sunshade. The couple paid a visit to John
Johansen (who died in 2012) happy to preserve the work of an architect whose major projects, like the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City, have been demolished. After the 1 1/2 years of renovations, they found the Huvelle house “offered a bit of relief to the strict Bauhaus boxiness,” says Sena.

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