Historic house museums aren’t just for Early American revolutionaries, pioneer settlers or Victorians any more. Yes, as appreciation for mid-20th century architecture has grown, so has the number of historic house museums. Kate and I have been working for several weeks to research and prepare what we believe is the first conclusive list of mid-century and modern historic house museums that you can visit and see. In the USA. In your Chevrolet, even.
Our list includes 59 mid century and modern house museums. A number of these are iconic, architect-designed “mid-century modern” masterpiece houses. But we also were somewhat liberal in including other early- and mid-20th historic houses that played key roles in the evolution of mid century residential architecture and the “modern” way we still live today. There are quite a few houses by Frank Lloyd Wright that fall into our “extremely influential” but not really “mid-century” category, for example.
Houses generally become “historic” for one of two reasons (or both): (1) Their architecture is special, or (2) Someone historic lived there. Reflecting this, the houses in our roundup are there for a variety of reasons — and we believe this diversity helps illuminate the story of mid-century America. In addition to the houses that are important examples of mid century and modern residential architecture, our list includes celebrity houses where Elvis, Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong lived… a number of “biographical” houses including from Russel Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, and Jackson Pollock and Louise Krasner… There are two presidential estates… and we dug and dug and dug to find two Lustron houses open to the public! We take the research all the way to one “post modern” house, a 1982 design by Frank Gehry. Don’t be harassing us, please, if you don’t like the way we sliced and diced the list; be nice; we were trying to show the love for 20th century modern and modern-esque houses that haven’t quite made it onto others’ formal lists yet. Also, we started to get cross-eyed after a while of hashing what’s “in” the list and “what’s out”. We kinda wanted to be done already.
If so, please let us know!
with lots of “bonus” photos you won’t find on the house websites
by clicking here.
Leann King says
There is a Frank Lloyd Wright house (the Bachman-Wilson house”) at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR, which gives tours. https://crystalbridges.org/frank-lloyd-wright/
June says
Hello.
Great house listing. I didn’t see the Meyer May House (https://meyermayhouse.steelcase.com/), located in Grand Rapids, MI, on your list. This property is notable because it was restored with an almost unlimited budget. It’s beautiful, has an amazing amount of painstakingly restored detail, and is worth the drive/visit.
KJill says
Absolutely tickled to see the Eisenhower house (National Historic site) on the list. Shortly after we bought our current (1958 ranch) home we visited there. DH and I just laughed when we saw the Ike’s bathroom had the exact same blue-green tile our partly original bathroom had. Sadly our bathroom wasn’t in quite as nice condition as so much tile had been damaged by previous renovations and we chose to redo completely. Our neighbor still has a Mamie Pink powder room.
Neil says
You may want to include, on your fancy map, the Adamson House on the beach in Malibu. It was built by the family who made Malibu tile, and is brimming with antique tile masterworks, as well as many other home construction artisan crafts associated with California Spanish Revival arts, and many original period furnishings.
Here’s the website: http://www.adamsonhouse.org/visit.php
But for better pictures…there are other sites on google. Don’t miss the huge persian carpet on the floor of the entry hall….which is actually handpainted tiles. If you visit and see it in person, it’ll gobsmack you!
Here’s a fun video about the family, the tile factory, and the inside of the house, including their use, throughout the house, of broken tile mosaics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPboHVi0Mr8
Neil