Melissa Wood Marcus Gleysteen

Related Articles

A beam and extended roofline create a shape reminiscent of the cantilever house in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie North by Northwest. That house was another inspiration for the home’s shape because of the way it appears to launch itself into space. Contrasting textures are found throughout the house. Inside the two-story living room, a sleek black leather couch contrasts against the warm hues of a wall made of copper leaf designed by Lena Fransioli of Zoe Design in Wenham. The back view of two granite boulders that frame the living room fireplace. On the glass-enclosed staircase architect Marcus Gleysteen developed a stainless steel clamping system in collaboration with Tripyramid, the company that created the stainless steel attachments for the Hayden Planetarium in New York and the Pyramid at the Louvre. In the kitchen, the textures of rough-edged bubinga countertops contrast against smooth blue glass tiles, frosted glass, and stainless steel. | Architect Marcus Gleysteen says the homeowners suggested shapes to inspire the sculptural form, including the peeled rind of an orange, the Sidney Opera House, and the the outline of a seagull against the sky. A smooth bubinga veneer covers the vanity and walls in the master bathroom.

The house appears on a hillside clearing, looking like a piece of modern art that was dropped from the sky. But if it seems out of this world, that’s no coincidence. The breathtaking results are exactly what the homeowners wanted.

“This project grew out of a challenge from our client to think like an artist, as opposed to an architect,” explains architect Marcus Gleysteen of Gleysteen Design in Cambridge, Mass.

In planning their summer home on an 11-acre parcel overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Massachusetts’s North Shore, his clients told him to draw first and foremost on his background as a sculptor. This was a dream come true for Gleysteen, who began his career as a sculptor before turning to architecture, and he refers to the home as a touchstone for everything he has done and everything that will follow.

Perched on high ocean-side bluffs, the house is reached by a 900-foot-long driveway that climbs up more than 250 feet. The first view of the home reveals a glass center framed by two curved structures, one lead-coated copper and the other a concrete painted red, arching away from each other. Through the glass center you can see clear through to the other side of the house where the home’s 60-percent glass exterior invites the dramatic scenery of the ocean and changing seasons into play with intersecting lines and contrasting materials within.

In designing the shape of the house, Gleysteen made early studies in crude clay models, just as he would have first composed a work of sculpture. The homeowners—a husband and wife who previously worked with Gleysteen when he designed an addition to their house in Brookline—also took an active role in the home’s design, suggesting shapes to inspire him, including the Sidney Opera House, the silhouette of a sea gull against the sky and the peeled rind of an orange.

Anyone who has seen Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film North by Northwest (1959) may recognize another early inspiration for Gleysteen’s design. Gleysteen says the movie home inspired him in the way it appears to launch itself into space; on the ocean side, a concave glass exterior framed by a roofline extending over a wide deck is reminiscent of the fantastic glassed-in cantilever home in the movie that suspended over the side of a mountain. He even included a green beam angled inward from roof to deck, which looks very similar to the steel beams that supported Hitchcock’s cantilever that Cary Grant climbed up to sneak into the house.

Inside, two formidable granite boulders in the living room, weighing three and seven tons respectively, not only frame a fireplace under a freestanding chimney of brushed stainless steel, but also create another dramatic perspective.

“The gap in the two stones allows a fire to be glimpsed as one enters the front door. The fireplace counter-balances the expanse of glass, sky, and ocean beyond it,” says Gleysteen. He explains that although the home’s cliff-top site is littered with boulders, the rocks he used were brought from Maine, as most of them were either inaccessible or too large.

“The boulders were used like found objects that were too intriguing to be dismissed,” says Gleysteen. “The granite monoliths spear out of the ground creating a sense of hearth and shelter at a primordial level.”

Gleysteen compares the home’s floor plan to a hand with the fingers spread out: the front door and entry space make up the palm while the main living spaces—the kitchen, dining area, living room, sunroom and library—radiate out like fingers toward the view.

Contrasting textures can be found throughout in both the construction materials and in the furniture. Inside the two-story living room, for example, a black leather couch offsets a copper leaf wall. In the kitchen, rough-edged bubinga countertops stand out against blue glass tiles and stainless steel appliances. The dining room features a smooth, curved wall of frosted glass that contrasts with the table made from a single slab of bubinga wood. Gleysteen designed the table with custom woodworker Dan Klein of Medford, who also built it.

“With materials, contrast and juxtaposition are important,” says Gleysteen. “Many of the edges of wood surfaces are ‘live’ and result from simply stripping off bark and not squaring off one long edge of the planks and boards used for counters, tabletops, stairs, and columns.”

Although there were no limits in the design, Gleysteen notes that the homeowners didn’t have an unlimited budget and  many cost-effective measures were taken. On the glassed-in staircase, for example, Gleysteen developed a clamping system in collaboration with Tripyramid, the company that created the stainless steel attachments for the Hayden Planetarium in New York and the Pyramid at the Louvre. By using the clamps instead of drilling the laminated, tempered glass for bolts, the cost of the stair was reduced sufficiently to make it buildable in line with the original design intent.

Gleysteen says the challenge of designing the home in sculptural forms turned into a project of pleasure and delight for both homeowners and architects. Ultimately, the home he produced defies the boundaries of architectural design, even among other contemporary structures.

“The house is unique, as a modern house, because the origin of the design lies in abstract sculptural form rather than a reiteration of current modern design principles,” explains Gleysteen. “Most architects are designers of buildings first and sculptors second.”

He explains that a lot of modern design in the United States is based on the juxtaposition of simple rectangular volumes animated by different textures (building materials) and basic figure-ground relationships between opaque and transparent surfaces. “This makes for pleasing artistic results, but there is a less dynamic relationship between the simple three-dimensional forms and the more painterly collage and compositional building faces,” says Gleysteen.

In contrast to those modern, yet conventional, principles, Gleysteen says that the observation of a lot of very good art influence the overall form of the house and its varied use of materials to create sculptural forms that flow through one another, solidifying and dissolving as they either collide or stand apart.

“This house has more in common with sculpture produced before the onset of my architectural studies and subsequent career than anything that has followed it,” says Gleysteen.