The Custance House, Designed by Hugh Stubbins

Two backyard photos are from our 2018 listing. The property is on the Lexington Cultural Resources Survey. Please contact us below for showings or if you have questions. 

Designed by renowned architect, Hugh Stubbins, and only owned by two families since, this Mid-Century-Modern is located a stone’s throw from Diamond Middle School, the bike path, and a mile from Lexington Center. Tucked away from the road, the open floor plan is centered around a fieldstone fireplace, which creates an inviting foyer that connects to the attached two-car garage and the front entry. A living room and dining room share the open plan and are filled with natural light from floor-to-ceiling windows. Soaring ceilings lend the heart of the home dramatic volume. The living area opens to a patio and overlooks a lush backyard with stone walls. An eat-in kitchen is tucked away on the other side of the dining room, divided by a pass-through butcher block counter. A split-level design leads up to two generous bedrooms with hardwood floors and a full bath. The first level is almost a mirror image, with two more bedrooms and full bath. A family room and office on the lower level have a second fireplace.

Systems include a circa-2001 high-efficiency oil-fired (can be converted to gas if new owner runs a line from the street) Viessmann boiler that sends four zones hot water radiant (in floors on the main level and ceilings on the second floor) and hot water baseboard heating throughout the home. There is also an indirect Viessmann hot water tank. A Lenox air handler in the garage provides the central air conditioning, with a compressor replaced in 2016. The electric service is 200 amps, and most of the wiring was updated circa 2003. The shared bath on the second floor was renovated circa-2004 and boasts a whirpool tub. Most –if not all — of the windows have been replaced. The roof is more than 20 years old. A new range was installed about a year ago, and a dishwasher about three years ago.

The Custance Brothers built the Home for Robert Custance and his family. It is built like the proverbial tank, with 12-inch-thick concrete floors on the main level. Slate floors encourage the symbiosis between indoors and out, leading from the living and dining room out to the patio in the rear and front walkway.

Showings begin around April 15.

The Architect

Despite regular predictions of its imminent demise — or survival only as an anachronism — the private house has remained at the core of the American Dream of the good life. Shelter magazines sell more copies than ever and there is probably no building type closer to the architect’s heart…

…Houses have frequently been thought of as the architects’ design research laboratory, but this approach should be adopted only with caution, lest the clients’ needs and desires get lost in search for a new form…

…When I started into practice, I was fortunate. The American house was going through a kind of evolution. Glass walls, open planning, and exposed structural materials all reflected new construction techniques and an increasingly informal lifestyle that has remained with us. Some of my early houses thus still seem, I think, quite contemporary today.

— Hugh Stubbins, 1976

Hugh Stubbins was a 23-year-old young man from Birmingham, Alabama, who graduated from Harvard’s School of Design when he was hired by Royal Barry Wills to help provide a modern counterpart to Wills’ seminal Cape Cod-style plans. Though the small house plan was hugely popular, Wills’ felt pressured by young architects influenced by a more International Style of modernism, specifically, Richard Neutra’s 1935 competition winner. The resulting structures took the same philosophy that Wills implemented in his affordable and small but well-designed Cape Cods and applied them to more forward-leaning, lighter-weight structures with open floor plans and cleaner lines. Perhaps the most important architectural element that was continued from the traditional New England structures was the post-and-beam construction of barns, This allows ultimate flexibility in interior wall placement and, subsequently, adaptable and expandable floor plans. Unrestrained from the constrictions of outer load-bearing walls, Stubbins was free to use walls of glass and other modern design techniques. The economy of the modest Royal Barry Wills Cape would now be translated into homes more in tune with their surroundings, with outer garden walls continuing into interior living areas and the idea of the chimney extending out through the roof, so literally central to the Royal Barry Wills Cape, was taken even further, with fireplaces themselves as part of a wall that could extend beyond the exterior walls.

The first Stubbins/Wills house, Needham, MA

Stubbins’ family house in Lexington, MA