Photos by Lara Kimmerer (interior) and John Tse (exterior). Click any photo to enlarge:
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26 Barberry Road, Lexington $1,049,000
We are thrilled to have the opportunity to market this brilliant house in one of Lexington’s most significant modernist neighborhoods.
Originally designed by The Architects Collaborative (TAC), in the highly desirable mid-century modern community of Five Fields, 26 Barberry Road has been expanded and updated over the years. It is now a four bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, 3462 square foot house with central air and a two-car garage. A studio with soaring ceiling height and a loft makes the perfect music room, library, artist’s studio, or home office. Alternatively, the floor plan offers the flexibility for this space to be used as a family room, a game room, or to turn the it into another bedroom suite as a master, teen, in-law, or au-pair suite.
There is a large eat-in kitchen, a grand fireplace, and sliders out to the deck overlooking the private fenced-in back yard. The house has three zones of heat and central air conditioning.
Offered at $1,049,000. Showings begin Friday, September 14. There will be a public open house on Sunday, September 16. Use the contact button up top to arrange a private showing.
The Neighborhood
The below is taken from our history of Five Fields, which is included in an overview of the modernist communities found in Lexington, here at this page (includes a video tour of Five Fields, Moon Hill, and Peacock Farm).
While the houses of Six Moon Hill were mainly built as a community to house the highly collaborative TAC partners and associates themselves (Bauhaus and TAC founder, Walter Gropius, built his own famous house out in the nearby town of Lincoln), the architects also conceived of their next such development of spec houses to sell to other home buyers and chose a farm on the southwestern part of town. The old Cutler Farm was purchased by the TAC and the young firm moved forward on their conception of a development that they would control from beginning to end. This became the neighborhood known as Five Fields.
One of the original eight TAC partners, Dick Morehouse, who was a resident of Moon Hill, oversaw the project and even acted as a salesman, showing the new homes to interested buyers. As noted above, Morehouse designed 440 Concord Ave.
The project was conceptualized as 68 house sites, though the initial phase consisted of 20 houses built in 1951, 1952, and 1953, the sales of which would finance the rest of the project. The original price points of these homes—some of which now fetch close to $2 million– ranged from about $18,000-35,000.
“For twenty years after the establishment of the neighborhood, TAC approval had to be obtained for additions. The restriction expired in the early 1970s. Today, almost all of the houses have been modified or added onto over the years, obscuring what was originally a neighborhood of houses built as variations on a few standard plans.” (See link to source, below).
As one of the other original partners, Chip Harkness, explained to the Boston Globe a number of years ago, describing the goals of the TAC when they set out to build Moon Hill, “An initial goal was low-income housing. We were shooting to build homes for under $15,000. That’s quite a bit less than the $1 million one of the houses recently went for.” Like Moon Hill, form followed function in the design of the Five Fields houses, the homes were sited sympathetically into their surroundings and the existing contours of the land, and there was common land set aside and a swimming pool, a playground with playing fields, and a skating pond, for the community. This community spirit carries on today in both Moon Hill and Five Fields.
A boy jumps into the Five Fields swimming pool, from the commemorative book, Five Fields — Five Decades: A Community in Progress
More can be read here, at the page for Five Fields on the town of Lexington’s Historic Survey site.
