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The Cape Cod Modern House Trust purchased the architect's dilapidated 1949 home and restored it to its former glory.
The living room in Marcel Breuer's former Wellfleet home after restoration. Peter McMahon
For decades, the Wellfleet home of Hungarian-born modernist architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer (1901-1981) stood empty, its contents and structure falling into disrepair. Peter McMahon, architect and founding director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT), found it almost painful to sit idly while a piece of modernist history fell into disrepair—and then Breuer's son Tamas decided to sell the house.
McMahon seized his opportunity to restore the renowned Bauhaus designer's house from 1949 to its former glory. He approached Tamas Breuer with a deal: Would he wait a year to put the house on the market so the trust could raise enough money to buy it? Tamas Breuer, who planned to put the property up for sale for $2 million, agreed. Within a year, the trust fund raised the necessary $2 million to purchase the home in 2024 and then borrowed another $700,000 for renovations.
The CCMHT was founded in 2007 with the aim of restoring the Outer Cape's stunning modern homes. In the 1940s, artists, designers, academics, architects, and other avant-garde thinkers flocked to Wellfleet and built or commissioned architects to construct summer homes.
These elegant homes are now treasured pieces of the Cape's modernist design history. McMahon has four mid-century houses leased from the National Park Service (The Kugel/Gips House, The Hatch House, The Weidlinger House and The Kohlberg House) because they are located on the National Park Service's Cape Cod National Seashore land. Although the organization carefully renovated and maintained the buildings, the Trust had never been the sole owner of any of its homes until this recent purchase.
Breuer was a member of the Harvard Five, a group of Bauhaus architects who founded a contemporary movement in New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Landis Gores and Eliot Noyes were also part of the group.
Breuer's Wellfleet House – which stands across the street from architect Serge Chermayeff's 1954 summer home – is considered one of the designer's two main prototypes: a long house. Breuer House I, designed for his family in New Canaan, is also a Long House in that it is a “long wooden box sitting on a brick base,” McMahon explained. The other prototype is the Binuclear – a house on the ground with two wings.
Resembling an elevated wooden cabin, the Wellfleet House was inspired by New England-style cottages and oyster houses. The structure is surrounded by just over 4 hectares of untouched nature and offers access to three ponds.
“It's way back in the woods, but it was kind of the epicenter of modernist experimenters,” McMahon explained. Breuer spent every summer in the house until his death in 1981 and his ashes are buried in front of it.
When the trust acquired the house, it had not been maintained for approximately 30 years. “It was really in extremely disrepair and parts of it were not insulated,” McMahon said.
The team had to bring the house up to building code standards by installing smoke detectors, building railings where there was previously an open platform with a 7-foot drop, installing steel reinforcements in portions of the floor near the sagging porch, and installing all-new siding, windows, plumbing and electrical systems.
As part of the historically accurate renovations, the walls, made from a recycled paper and wax material called Homasote, were freshly painted white and the floors were repainted black, revealing a Japanese design influence. Other materials were sourced to be as close to the original as possible. For example, some of the bathroom walls were covered in a light gray laminate called Marlite, and the team discovered that it is still made in the exact same color.
McMahon pointed out that every part of the house is above ground level and the roof slopes upward. “You feel like you’re floating,” McMahon said. “It's right on the edge of this precipice, so you get the amazing feeling of being thrown out over the treetops and the pond. The moves are very simple and amazingly effective.”
With the purchase of the Long House came many of its contents, including homemade brutalist furniture that Breuer designed for the house, an extensive photography collection by Tamas Breuer, and an art collection that included works by Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, and other artists with whom Breuer was friends at art schools such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. During negotiations, McMahon also secured a painting by Alexander Calder and a self-portrait that Breuer made when he was 17 and which had never been seen by scholars.
The only problem: Most of the art was attached to the wall with thumbtacks. “There were mold issues and there were silverfish that had eaten some of the paper,” McMahon said. Like the rest of the house, its contents required careful conservation and restoration.
The renovation work on the house was completed by summer 2025 and it was presented to the public at an open day in September. Like the other houses managed by the CCMHT, it is available to rent during the summer months and hosts artists during the off-peak season. Guided tours of the huts are also offered several times a year. It's all part of McMahon's vision to make the houses tangible rather than turning them into museums.
Today, the Breuer House looks much as it did in the 1950s and 1960s, with simple furnishings, floor-to-ceiling windows, original artwork and reproductions, and antique light fixtures.
“I've always liked Breuer, but after restoring his house I have a whole new respect for him because the house was in such bad shape and full of trash that you really couldn't tell what it was. You couldn't notice the rooms,” McMahon said.
“But when everything is back as it should be and the spaces are legible, you see the incredible genius of how he took these very simple shapes and arranged them along this ridge – over a pond, over a very steep slope, to maximum effect.”