Mid-century modern homes: 7 things you probably didn’t know about Greater Boston’s (2024)

Real Estate

‘The biggest surprise for most people is that they are even here.’

By Madeline Bilis -- Boston.com correspondent

February 21, 2024

When you think of the residential architecture of Greater Boston, you probably picture the region’s 18th-century Colonials and Capes. Homes here are historic, and they’re part of what makes New England so charming. But there’s another style of house that has a commanding presence in the immediate suburbs, though they’re historic in a different way.

Mid-century modern homes designed by pioneering architects are sprinkled across towns like Lincoln, Lexington, Belmont, and others. They hearken back to a time when forward-thinking designers wanted to build practical homes — and communities — for a new generation of families after World War II.

Most of those homes are still standing, and when one of them hits the market, buyers flock to it.

Bill Janovitz and John Tse have specialized in selling mid-century modern homes for nearly 20 years. In 2005, after a stint blogging about modern homes on his real estate website, Janovitz founded ModernMass.com to shed light on the rich architectural history of the Boston ‘burbs. The site continues to go deep on the backgrounds of these modern creations for sale.

Here, Janovitz and other experts share a few things you probably didn’t know about the many mid-century gems dotting the towns outside the city.

1. Mid-century modern homes are everywhere, if you know to look for them.

“The biggest surprise for most people is that they are even here,” Janovitz said.

Clusters of modern homes have a large representation in towns like Lexington and Lincoln, though plenty of others popped up in Weston, Belmont, Newton, Concord, and beyond.

“The western suburbs really blossomed with them,” he said.

Architects from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, among others, wanted space to build functional, cost-effective homes for themselves, so they looked to the suburbs for space. Their goal was to build planned, cooperative communities with ideals based in utopianism.

2. One of the most well-known mid-century modern communities is tucked away in Lexington.

One early mid-century modern suburban community is a neighborhood called Six Moon Hill. It was developed by a firm called The Architects Collaborative, or TAC, and was made up of eight architects under the leadership of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement. In 1947, the group bought a tract of land in Lexington and decided to build homes for their families. With experimental flair, they designed community-minded houses that were all priced equally and allotted the same amount of land for each plot.

“The genius of many of these houses is how much they were able to do on a very modest scale,” said David N. Fixler, a lecturer in architecture urban planning and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “And despite the fact that these houses are set largely on half-acre lots, they feel much more rural because of a light touch on the landscape.”

3. Mid-century modern communities have unique names.

Six Moon Hill is among several of these planned mid-century communities. Lexington also counts Peaco*ck Farm, Five Fields, and Turning Mill, while Belmont has Snake Hill, designed by MIT architect Carl Koch, an early adopter of prefabricated building materials.

Many of the homes flaunt classic mid-century features, such as low-slung roofs, sliding glass doors, and vertical siding. The goal was not only to design homes suitable for modern living, but to foster a sense of community within each neighborhood, thanks to cooperative elements like common outdoor gathering areas and in some, community pools.

“The idea of having common land, common facilities, common purpose, and to a degree, loosely defined design guidelines to maintain this character — not only in the architecture of the houses but in the way in which the land and community spaces are used — is very important,” Fixler said.

4. They were early adopters of passive solar techniques.

While large single-pane windows and cathedral ceilings aren’t exactly energy-saving features these days, there were some original aspects of these mid-century modern homes that resembled passive solar qualities.

“The architects really paid attention to the setting and where the sun was at any point in the season,” Janovitz said. “So, there were bigger overhangs to shield the sun during the hottest part of the day during summer, and in the winter, it went the other way.”

5. But not everything about their mid-century modern designs was perfect.

Floor-to-ceiling windows that brought the outdoors in and open floor plans with flexible living spaces are hallmarks of mid-century modern design. But not every aspect of it holds up today. Take, for example, radiant heat flooring — on every level.

“You have to be careful because there could be radiant heat in the ceiling,” providing heat for the floors on the second level, Janovitz said. “You can’t just poke a recessed light anywhere; you have to know where the heat pipes are.”

6. That’s because the goal was innovation.

In designing their own homes, the architects leaned into innovation. They were experimenting on their living spaces, incorporating new features and layouts. Before plastic dome skylights skyrocketed in popularity in the 1970s, architects were trying them out in Six Moon Hill. They’re said to have used excess Plexiglas “bubble” windows from bomber turrets to create skylights.

“They had first been used in fighter planes in the war,” Janovitz said. “Companies had a surplus of these bubbles, but also the equipment that made them. So it’s a matter of ingenuity — finding new uses for this kind of thing before they had to make them obsolete.”

According to the National Register of Historic Places, which added Six Moon Hill to its list in 2016, the architects’ inclusion of industrial materials like Plexiglas and metal was their way of using industrialization to their advantage and embracing the postwar “rise of the machine.”

“There was a lot of experimentation and customization,” said Boston Architectural College’s director of historic preservation, Eleni Glekas. “And for these architects to be designing in these historic areas like Lexington, it was very much separated from that. They weren’t really designing to fit into a particular historic character. They had a lot of leeway from a regulatory perspective to test out a lot of ideas on their own homes. The timing was right for them to do this, and I don’t know if we would necessarily be able to see it again.”

7. You’re bound to uncover a surprise.

As part of their architectural experimentation, the designers behind Six Moon Hill, Snake Hill, and others also incorporated elements to which they were drawn.

“Say somebody went to Japan and got into Japanese baths, so they got the idea to install one of those in the house. You’ll find stuff like that,” Janovitz said. “These tended to be innovative, progressive people, world travelers. They thought of themselves in those terms. And a lot of these folks were highly intellectual — and [buyers] still are — so you get more experimental stuff like that.”

Madeline Bilis can be reached at [emailprotected].