Flipping a Philip Johnson: The Booth House Gets a Lifeline

Before the Glass House — Philip Johnson’s celebrated glass-and-steel home in New Canaan, Conn. — there was the Booth House.

Built in 1946 in Bedford, N.Y., about nine miles away and three years before the iconic pavilion-like Glass House, the Booth House was designed as a weekend escape for Richard Booth, a Manhattan-based advertising executive, and his wife, Olga Booth. It was the modernist architect’s first residential commission.

Unlike the transparent Glass House, which Johnson designed for himself, the Booth House was built for budget-conscious clients from concrete block, a material he didn’t use often — he called it “the world’s most unsympathetic material” in an interview with Robert A.M. Stern in 1985. But while the Booth House is modest compared with the 49-acre art-filled compound and museum in New Canaan, the techniques that Johnson would later employ at the Glass House are hard to miss: a simple rectangular building, artfully placed on the landscape, with a brick fireplace that anchors the open floor plan.

It is one of the earliest works by an American architectural titan, and yet the Booth House has sat abandoned for over a decade, falling into deep disrepair. The Booths sold the house in 1955 to the architectural photographer Robert Damora and his wife, the architect Sirkka Damora. After Mr. Damora’s death in 2009, Ms. Damora and her two adult children spent a decade trying to sell it, even publishing a plea in 2017 to find worthy stewards. They finally unloaded it, according to state records, in 2019 for $1.2 million to an LLC associated with an art curator. But it sat vacant and slowly decayed for years afterward, waffling on the market.

“I probably had around 160 showings in the last year and a half,” said Melissa Marcogliese, an agent with Compass. “Nobody was willing to take on the work.”

Finally, in April, the house was rescued by Drew Lang, founder of Lang Architecture, and Ravi Arps, a builder and the founder of Plane, who bought the property and two adjacent lots for $900,000 under their newly created design-build firm, R & D. The goal is to restore the home to pristine condition and then find an architecture enthusiast who can keep it that way. “We’re looking for a steward,” said Mr. Arps.

The firm plans to spend about $2.5 million on the project, with an estimated completion date of summer 2027.

“There are certain aspects of the house that we are reconstructing literally as they were constructed originally,” said Mr. Lang. “We’re building to the original footprint of the house and maintaining the shape and proportion of that iconic facade.”

Mr. Lang and Mr. Arps found some of the original architectural drawings at the Avery Library at Columbia University, which maintains a large Philip Johnson archive. But not every part of the house has existing drawings to pull from. And there will be new elements, like an underground level that will double the home’s size from 1,632 square feet to an estimated 3,200 square feet. They’re also planning to add a new courtyard, carport and enclosed outdoor storage.

Mr. Arps and Mr. Lang can’t control what will happen to the home once it sells, but they’re hoping to get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which could add some modest protections.

“Private homes are hard to protect. It really depends on the stewards,” said Kirsten Reoch, the executive director at the Glass House, which is a National Trust Historic Site. She noted that there are other avenues the owners could take to prevent demolition or significant alterations to the house, like securing preservation easements with the New York State Historic Preservation Office or a local preservation nonprofit. These protections would extend to any new buyer and cover the entire building.

Ms. Reoch said that simply restoring the home is already a major victory. “I’m actually quite thrilled that the new owners plan to restore it rather than demolish it,” she said. “The house was in really terrible condition, so it was a very short distance for any home buyer to think it’s not worth putting in the effort. So if they’re closing that gap by taking it to a level of beauty that it originally had, I would hope that it bodes well.”

“People who buy well-preserved modernist houses tend to keep them,” she added.

Ms. Marcogliese, the Compass agent, said it’s too soon to know what the house will list for when the work is complete. “This house is a unicorn in Bedford,” she said. “But I would say it will probably be on the market for over $3 million. Maybe even over $3.5 million. Philip Johnson isn’t making any more houses.”

Mr. Arps said profit was secondary to R & D’s goals. “If you’re just looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective, I’m not sure this would have been a project we took on,” he said, calling the effort “a curatorial restoration” rooted in “fidelity to Johnson’s original intent and the patience to get the details right.”

While this is the first foray into this type of work for R & D, other firms have made a specialty of buying, restoring and reselling architecturally significant homes. In Los Angeles, the restoration expert and entrepreneur Michael LaFetra has been buying and revitalizing houses since the early aughts, including Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21, R.M. Schindler’s How House, Ray Kappe’s Gertler House, and John Lautner’s Wolff House.

The Los Angeles-based firm HabHouse, founded by partners Andreas Larsson and Mike Landry, bought and restored a Calvin Straub house in Pasadena, among others. Mr. Larsson said he gets a little nervous when architecture firms take on restorations.

“What I see happen sometimes is that designers feel that they need to inject their own architectural language into them, and in my opinion, that’s not what you need to do,” he said. “These types of houses will be valued more if you leave them alone. It’s like collecting a piece of art. If you’re buying a Picasso, you don’t want some Joe Schmo to have painted a certain section on it.”

Since purchasing the Booth House, R & D has dived into the research and development phase — sourcing the original drawings, surveying the site and speaking with other owners of Johnson homes, like the people who bought the Hodgson House in New Canaan. They’ve also reached out to Ms. Reoch and the Glass House museum for guidance.

“We always want to support anyone who’s considering buying a modernist house,” said Ms. Reoch, “because we understand the care, maintenance and restoration techniques involved.”

Without such care, these kinds of homes are often demolished. In New Canaan, an epicenter of modernist architecture, there were once 120 houses by notable architects, according to Christa Carr, the director of communications at the Glass House. Now there are only 87. “Anything we can do to reverse that trend, and to help people see the value in buying and restoring a modern house, is something that I really want to help promote.”