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Nearly 70 years ago, Paul Rudolph dreamed up plans for a four-bedroom house tucked on a wooded parcel in rural Pennsylvania. The budding Brutalist architect hadn’t yet devised his most famous structures, among them Halston House in New York and Yale’s Art & Architecture Building, but his penchant for bold architectural gestures was clear. The Fullam House, as it’s now known, was to be embedded into a rugged hillside, with monumental walls made of local fieldstone as well as a striking crown with a repeating diamond silhouette.
Daniel Isayeff
The Fullam House in Bucks County, PA.
The owners—a local judge and his wife—began building the residence according to Rudolph’s plans, but they stopped before the structure as he imagined it was completed, around two-thirds of the way through. Apparently, the couple figured they already had enough space and didn’t want to spend the extra money to finish the job. To maintain their privacy, they implored Rudolph to keep their new home unpublished and out of public view, a request he honored even as he became one of his generation’s leading architects.
Daniel Isayeff
The dining area features clerestory windows and fieldstone walls.
Set on 26 acres in Bucks County, the two-story residence went largely under the radar—and technically unfinished—for decades. That all changed in 2014, when the new owner, Eric Wolff, painstakingly completed construction according to the late architect’s original plans. Wolff worked with local architect John Wolstenholme to pull off the feat, which ended up winning a local AIA award for excellence and was later admitted to the National Register of Historic Places.
Daniel Isayeff
A smaller living area is located next to the kitchen on the top floor.
Now, Wolff is parting with the four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot house for $5.85 million. The timing is fortuitous, as interest in Rudolph is reaching a crescendo. The Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a retrospective of his work last year, and several of his residences (such as New York’s 23 Beekman Place) are for sale.
“This is one of those houses in the middle of nature, and you always feel that,” Wolff told Curbed. “I’ve lived there for 12 years now, and every time I see the first snow, I gasp.”
372 Brownsburg Rd in Newton, Pennsylvania, is listed for $5.85 million with Maureen Reynolds of Serhant.
Geoffrey Montes is an associate editor at ELLE Decor with a serious love for all things real estate and design. Before that, he worked at Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Preservation magazines, covering everything from jaw-dropping listings to world-famous architects and design events like Salone del Mobile and Homo Faber.