Light-Filled Lexington Turning Mill Modern

Located in the Turning Mill Neighborhood, two houses away from the heated country-club-like Paint Rock Pool, this post-and-beam midcentury-modern stunner is filled with natural light, and there is plenty of space to live, work, and play. The main living area features cathedral ceilings, exposed beams, skylights, an open-concept floor plan, a raised-hearth fireplace, hardwood floors, sliders to front and back decks, and a 1987 addition featuring a den that opens to a screened porch. The bedroom wing has three bedrooms, a primary suite with a private bath, and a shared hallway bath. The split entry leads to the walk-out lower level, which has a family room with a fireplace, and there’s an additional game room that had originally had plans for three additional bedrooms and another full bath (which it is plumbed for). There’s a laundry room as well. An attached two-car garage is under the den and has a separate entrance up to the eat-in kitchen, which has a breakfast bar in addition to a dining area.

The house has been lovingly maintained and updated by the same family for 56 years and ready to have the next stewards enjoy living here as much as they have.

Located in the Turning Mill Neighborhood Conservation District.

Price, video, and open house times coming soon. Showings begin Friday, April 8 open house 4:00-5:30. Additional open houses Saturday and Sunday 1:00-3:00 

Features and Other Details

• Oil-fired forced hot air heat with 2009 or 2010 furnace and 2020 oil tank.
• 2018 Rheem efficient electric water heater
• Pressure-treated deck installed roughly 10 years ago
• 2019 refrigerator; 2021 range
• 200 amp electric
• One half of roof replaced in 2020, the other is about 16 years old
• One-inch rigid foam insulation under roof
• 2020 new driveway
• INCLUDED: Pool table

The Turning Mill Neighborhood

Residents love the area due to its proximity to the highly desirable 2015-built Estabrook School (adjacent — many kids walk or bike) and because it offers membership in the country-club-like Paint Rock swimming pool, which was improved and updated in 2012. It also borders the vast Paint Mine conservation area, with beautiful walking trails. The Lexpress bus runs through. And a quick zip takes you down backroads to Whole Foods, Super Stop & Shop, Marshall’s, and so on in Bedford, or back the other way into the center of Lexington. And it is not far from Route 128.

Below is the swimming pool from summer 2012:

The land for the Turning Mill neighborhood was purchased by the Techbuilt Corporation. There were three model homes.  The first one built was 4 Turning Mill. Most people in Lexington know the area as Turning Mill, but it started out being referred to as Middle Ridge. Though it is now a large area of eight or nine streets, it started around Turning Mill Road and Demar Road, with Techbuilt houses designed by Carl Koch, before growing further north and west and incorporating other modern designs, most notably, the Peacock Farm-style house plan designed by Walter Pierce, who along with Danforth Compton founded Lexington’s Peacock Farm neighborhood on the other side of town. This design was licensed out to other developers, as was the case here in Turning Mill. There have also been some Deck Houses and custom homes built. The expanded part of the area is now referred to as “Upper Turning Mill.” There are now Facebook and neighborhood web pages for Turning Mill.

Research in part via Lexington Historic Survey, which notes:

Of the 95 homes in Middle Ridge, thirty-five are prefabricated “Techbuilt” homes.

Middle Ridge was originally conceived and designed in 1955 by architect Carl Koch as a neighborhood of “Techbuilt” homes. After receiving his architectural training at Harvard under Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, Koch taught architecture at MIT and created the first planned community of modern houses in the region at Snake Hill Road in Belmont in 1941. Prior to building in Lexington, he also designed and constructed Conantum, Concord’s first residential housing development (1951) and Kendal Common in Weston (1950). First introduced in 1953, the Techbuilt house was a low-cost, semi-factory-built modern style house which used modular construction.