By Anthony Paletta
Barns renovated by modern architects are somewhat more common than you might imagine. Mies van der Rohe renovated one for Mary Callery on Long Island and Charles Gwathmey renovated one in Greenwich, Connecticut, for himself. This five-bedroom house, a bringing together of the historic and the modern, subsequently expanded though retaining its original details, is now on the market for $4.595mn.
Gwathmey, who died in 2009, was co-founder of Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman, the modernist architecture firm that designed houses for clients including Steven Spielberg and Jerry Seinfeld and made additions to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University in Connecticut.
Their trademark was rigorous spatial experiments. Gwathmey’s stamp on the 200-year old barn, converted in 1973, was fairly light: his aim was to preserve a simple exterior and a grand interior. He added clerestory windows and converted the horse stalls to bedrooms on the ground floor. The sheer volume of the barn — the ceiling at its upper level is 30ft high — makes for an unusual home.
“No one would build a volume that’s a void like that anymore,” says Paul Aferiat, a former employee of Gwathmey’s, whose firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates was tasked with expanding the barn in 1995 when it was bought by new owners Dana and Paul Caan. Gwathmey recommended Aferiat when the Caan’s asked who would be a good fit to work on the barn as they had run out of bedrooms for their three daughters.
Dana Caan’s expansion plans were simple. “We basically told them how we live and how we wanted the house to work. I wanted the main floor to be the hub for living. The flow between the public and private spaces takes the huge volumes and makes them more intimate.”
Aferiat and his partner Peter Stamberg sought to extend the home in a manner that concealed its bulk. Aferiat explained their aim of “keeping it relatively modest from the street while making it in fact twice as big”.
They sought to retain original features as much as possible. The upper floor is divided by a striking hybrid piece of furniture: a bookcase cabinet and table which Aferiat called “a four-leaf clover”. It provides spatial division without walling off the space. Dana Caan says “It’s a huge open space but I can read my book on one side and no one would notice.” The lower level was substantially rearranged but original cabinetry was shifted to other locations.
A spiral staircase inside a partly glass-walled, silo-like addition is a nod to both the building’s agricultural roots and to Gwathmey Siegel’s repeated use of particular shapes. The additions are clad in corrugated aluminium, the new wing’s roof was finished with standing-seam zinc, while roofs on the original barn feature new wooden shingles. In another inversion, original aluminium window frames were swapped for mahogany.
A subdued tone was not what the architects were after inside. Aferiat says “Gwathmey’s interest wasn’t in people continuing his style but in taking it and moving it in a new direction, which is what we did.” Their work is exceptionally colourful, something that Gwathmey’s generally wasn’t, and they injected plenty of this into the project.
The colour provided an excellent backdrop for the Caans’ extensive outsider art collection. Stamberg quoted David Hockney on this: “He once said to us that if an artwork sits on a white wall, the first thing you notice is the frame. If it sits on a coloured wall, the first thing you see is the art.” The palette includes yellows that range from pale to bright, oranges, greens, blues and violets, setting off multiple artworks by Thornton Dial and Bill Traylor. The firm rehung the family’s art collection, much to their delight: “Everything was in a different place,” says Dana Cann, “It made you appreciate them in a new way.”
Crumbling brick flooring on the ground floor was replaced with slate, with new oak elements introduced in other floor coverings and cabinetry. “It is not fussy,” says Dana Caan. “No space is off limits. The girls grew up playing in the great room. The connection between private and public spaces always brings you back to the central hub of the house.”
The 490 North Street barn is on sale with Spencer Sodokoff at Houlihan Lawrence.
Photography: Houlihan Lawrence
