Modern

“Our firm is a group of modernists at heart. We thrive on the endless possibility for creativity in modern design.” Lucien Vita said that in a 2014 profile of the firm.

The portfolio has widened a great deal since. Most of the houses on this site keep a shingle roof, a Cape’s frame or a ranch’s low line. But the modern houses are where the firm’s habits of mind are easiest to see, because there is nothing traditional to hide behind. Every decision shows.

Warmth in a simple form

The common criticism of modern houses is that they are cold: white boxes, hard surfaces, rooms that photograph better than they live. The firm describes Lucien’s work as bringing warmth and texture into a modern framework, and the modern houses on this site show what that means in material terms.

On Blue Coat Lane in Westport, a house recognised in the 2018 HOBI Awards as Best Modern Custom Home is clad in charred cypress. Burned wood is dark, matte and full of grain. It gives a plain volume a surface that changes with the light and feels made by hand. Against it, the house uses European windows and doors and a canopy of steel and glass, so the warm material and the precise one are set side by side instead of mixed.

That pairing is the method. A modern house can be built from very few materials. When there are few, each has to carry more, and the contrast between them does the work that ornament does on a traditional house.

In the same profile he gave a second line that explains the modern houses better than any label: “You don’t always need to play it safe,” he said. A modern house is the place where that advice is tested most directly. It asks a client to accept a form with fewer references to houses they already know, and it asks the designer to make that form comfortable enough to live in. The houses in this chapter are the cases where both sides took the risk.

Volume before detail

The second habit is to think in volumes. A traditional house usually begins with a type: a Cape, a colonial, a shingle-style cottage. A modern house begins with a few simple shapes and the relationships between them.

In a house described in New England Home in fall 2015, for a couple who came to Connecticut from across the Atlantic, the scheme was a set of individually simple boxes that interlock and appear to float. The clients wanted something minimal in its detail and complex in how its volumes meet. The design achieved both by keeping each box plain and letting all the complexity live in the joints between them.

Three ways of drawing a house

That house raised a practical problem the article described well: how to show a client a design whose interest lies in how its parts project, recede and connect. The answer was three kinds of drawing, each doing a different job.

A hand-drawn elevation shows the house as someone approaching it would see it. It is the most familiar drawing and the most human, but it flattens the house: you cannot tell what stands forward and what sits back.

An exploded diagram pulls the volumes apart in space so you can see how each fits into the others. It is the drawing that explains the idea.

A near-photographic 3D rendering shows what it will be like to move through the house and live in it. It is the drawing that lets a client say yes with confidence.

None of the three is enough alone. The elevation is honest but partial; the diagram is clear but abstract; the rendering is vivid but can make anything look finished. Used together, they let a client understand a modern house before it exists, which matters more for a modern house than for a traditional one, because the client has fewer familiar references to fall back on.

Light and the sun

Modern houses on this site also take their orientation seriously. The 2015 house was planned with passive-house strategies, as the article described them: most of the large windows face south, and deep overhangs let winter sun in while screening summer light. Simple forms make that easier to control. A plain box can be turned to the sun and given an overhang of exactly the right depth in a way that a complicated traditional roof often cannot. These were the strategies the house was planned around, not a measure of how it performs.

The houses

Two modern houses follow. Blue Coat Lane in Westport, with its charred cypress, steel-and-glass canopy and roof garden. And the house of floating boxes from 2015, with its interlocking volumes and three ways of being drawn.

Vita Design Group has also designed modern houses built by other firms. A house on Compo Beach Road in Westport, built by Tallman Segerson with Vita Design Group, received the 2019 HOBI Award for Best Modern Custom Home; Connecticut Builder described its red kitchen, iridescent tile, concrete floors, pneumatic elevator and water views.