Gropius House – A luxurious living space with modern design

The house is located about 30 minutes by car from the suburbs of Boston, passing through the hilly forest area typical of New England. If you are not very careful, you will miss the small white sign. After parking the car in a gravel parking space, you will see a small, white, boxy, two-story house. This is the Gropius House. Gropius, a representative architect of modernism and the founder of the Bauhaus, built this house for his family when he was invited to Harvard University in 1938. The house is currently maintained by a management organization for historical and cultural properties in New England and is open to the public. That day, despite the rainy weather in the evening, about a dozen young visitors were waiting for the guide to show them around. Not all of them looked like students of architecture or design, so how would this house look to them, who are used to seeing the stylized New England style houses common in this area?

The Gropius House is very modest. It is not spacious, and the space from the entrance to the hall with the spiral staircase is narrower than that of an average house in Japan. The materials used are a combination of new materials at the time, such as ribbed wooden wall materials, bricks, natural stone, plaster, glass blocks, and chrome-plated metal, which are unique to this region, and are not particularly expensive. According to the guide, many of the materials are pre-made and can be ordered from a catalog. However, this house has a very rich space and is filled with natural light, and even to the eyes of a modern person, it looks very comfortable to live in. Of course, this house is a condensed embodiment of the modern design advocated by Gropius, and it is also a treasure trove of modern design, including Breuer's furniture made by Bauhaus craftsmen. However, this house does not have a single bit of the exclusive coldness that modern design can easily fall into. Unlike the Breuer chairs you see in museums, the same chairs here look very comfortable and comfortable to sit in. Looking at this house, one is reminded that modern design aims to make people's lives more comfortable and is deeply connected to them.

This house is filled with all the modern elements of life that modern people require, such as the relationship between privacy and public space, consideration for the growth of children, consideration for enjoying life, and consideration for dining with close friends. It also contains many design elements that are often incorporated into modern homes. It has all the design elements that were incorporated into subsequent homes, such as large picture windows and long horizontal windows that carefully but proactively incorporate the surrounding Landscape Design, eaves that control the sunlight that changes with the seasons, a semi-outdoor terrace porch that juts out like a peninsula leading to the dining room, glass screens that give a sense of spaciousness and separation to the master bedroom and the dressing room connected to it, a roof terrace, a coat hanger space in the hall, and a light spiral staircase. The kitchen, which has a stainless steel counter integrated with a stainless steel sink, is also equipped with a dishwasher and garbage disposal, which were very rare at the time.

This house was built about 70 years ago, and it would not feel strange at all if it was built here yesterday. It is so modern that it fits in with modern life. This house shows us that the modern design advocated by Gropius can coexist with nature, while giving us a sense of being warmly and comfortably enveloped, and that it is still effective in designing modern homes. We highly recommend that you visit it at least once.