Breuer’s Wellfleet

Restoring Marcel Breuer’s Wellfleet cottage one photograph at a time.

Words: Rachel Hahn

Photography: Aaron A. Binaco

Archive: Tamás Breuer c/o Cape Cod Modern House Trust

In the 75 years since Marcel Breuer built a cottage for himself and his family along the tranquil shores of Williams Pond in Wellfleet, the screened-in porch has sagged about seven inches into the sandy earth. Big pine trees have fallen on it — though they’ve not caused permanent damage — and the Paul Klee lithographs and Alexander Calder paintings on the walls have gathered a thin layer of dust. Breuer was once captivated by the cottage’s view of three ponds — Gull, Higgins, and Williams — and his modernist, house-on-stilts design maximized sightlines of this natural setting. But the open landscape that once allowed for these views has become crowded with pines. The verdant grass that had sloped down to the pond’s edge has dried out and dulled. Peter McMahon, founder of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT), the non-profit organization that protects and restores such modern homes on the Outer Cape, calls the overgrown terrain a “dysfunctional jungle.”

When I spoke to McMahon in early summer, he was on the cusp of the final round of fundraising to secure the $2.4 million dollars needed to restore Breuer’s summer escape, which he calls the most significant modernist house on the Cape.

Breuer (1901–1981) is the famed Hungarian-German architect and designer behind beloved buildings (the Madison Avenue Whitney Museum of American Art, the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris) and memorable chairs (the Wassily with its balanced leather straps, the Cesca with its iconic bent tubular steel and wicker caning). He’s had an outsized influence on the aesthetic signatures of present-day “good design.” You’ll still find Cesca chairs in the dining rooms of metropolitan homes or tucked underneath small tables in fast casual restaurants, the only symbols of the past in a room full of millennial pink.

Breuer designed the Cesca in 1928, when he was the head of the carpentry department at the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany. At 19-years-old, he was one of the school’s first and youngest students. He rose through the ranks quickly, striking up a lifelong working relationship with its founder, Walter Gropius, one of the pioneering figures of modern architecture. Gropius founded the school in 1919 to unite architects, sculptors, and painters under a single vision of craftsmanship that could shatter the divide between artist and artisan, later making mass production a central part of its vision. The Bauhaus closed its doors the same year Hitler came to power, though Gropius had already left the institution five years earlier. Fleeing Nazi persecution, Gropius brought his radical design program stateside, moving to Massachusetts in 1937 to teach at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Soon after, Gropius rented a house with his wife in Marion, Massachusetts (Plymouth County), where Breuer and some of his fellow Bauhaus colleagues who had also fled Europe came for a visit. In a letter Gropius wrote to Breuer, he described how he was taken with the “fine wooden houses in the Colonial style painted in white.” He thought Breuer would feel the same way. “[These Colonial houses] will delight you as much as they do me,” he wrote. “In their simplicity, functionality, and uniformity they are completely in our line.” Gropius subsequently invited Breuer to teach at Harvard, where he joined the faculty that fall. Breuer then visited like-minded architect and industrial designer Serge Chermayeff at his rental cottage on Wellfleet’s Slough Pond, where Chermayeff later built his own studio. Breuer bought the plot of land right across the way, building his own house on the pond for just $5,000.

If Gropius were to critique his former student’s cottage in Wellfleet as it stands right now, he might call it incomplete. Gropius wanted to purge modernism from within, calling for concise, economical designs with an emphasis on structural functions that freed architecture from “a welter of ornament.” According to Gropius, these practical concerns depended on another value: “The aesthetic satisfaction of the human soul is just as important as the material. Both find their counterpart in that unity which is life itself.” It’s hard to satisfy the human soul when there’s not much life within the architecture itself — the house has been lightly lived in by Breuer’s son, Tamas Breuer, for decades. He spends just a month at the cottage each year.

When you look through the negatives of Tamas’s photography archive, however, the elder Breuer’s house comes back to life. Although it may need a major physical renovation, the photographs restore the house in a spiritual sense. Much of the archive dates back to the 1960s and ’70s, when Tamas was a teenager and young adult. Tamas’s creative pursuit shaped the design of the Wellfleet cottage; Breuer added a darkroom, a studio, and a small apartment for Tamas in the 1960s. In Tamas’s photographs, a stark path of sand cuts through dusty dune scrub. The glassy pond appears so still that a tree is perfectly doubled in its reflection. Children roll a tire around the beach. Sand dunes appear to be in motion, mirroring the slow-rolling waves that lap the shores of the bay. A tuxedo cat peers out of the remnants of a Kodak shipping box. Breuer’s house is brimming with energy, captured by snapshots of conversations on the ingeniously suspended porch, lively parties, and unhurried cups of coffee and tea. “For me, the pictures are an amazing window into that world in the ’60s and ’70s,” McMahon says. He estimates Tamas used up a roll of film a day. “These pictures are invaluable for the restoration, showing how things were set up. Where was the art hung? Where was the furniture? How did people use the spaces? But the larger thing is that it’s this document of a time and place.”

McMahon founded the CCMHT in 2007 to “collect, archive, and share documentation of the Outer Cape’s exceptional modern architecture, restore a group of important endangered modern houses, and to relaunch them as platforms for new creative work,” which it accomplishes through a residency program.. The CCMHT leased and restored four abandoned modern homes (of the more than 100 in the area) that are owned by the National Park Service — thereby saving them from threatened demolition by the state — but Breuer’s cottage was the holy grail. McMahon first tried to get in touch with Tamas about ten years ago for his book on these historical homes (Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape, 2014). It was then that he got an initial glimpse at a sampling of Tamás’s photographs.

With the photo archive as his guide, McMahon will start restoring Breuer’s Wellfleet cottage piece by piece — rebuilding the decks, staircases, and the rotted trellis. He one day hopes to make a book from Tamás’s archive of images, and use them as the framework for an ongoing public history project that tells the stories of the people, places, and objects that appear in their frames. The significance of these photographs marks a full-circle moment for the house. Breuer thought of the Wellfleet cottage, representative of his Long House designs, as a camera itself. “There is the house on stilts, that is elevated above the landscape, almost like a camera on a tripod,” he once wrote. “This will give you a better view, almost a sensation of floating above the landscape, or of standing on the bridge of a ship. It gives you a feeling of liberation, a certain élan, a certain daring.” With Tamás’s photos charting the way, McMahon speaks below about how he’ll restore this feeling of liberation, starting with gently lifting Breuer’s sunken cottage back up from the sandy earth.

Rachel Hahn: When did you first come across Tamás’s archive of photographs?

Peter McMahon: Tamás Breuer was reluctant to talk to me the first five years of the CCMHT, and then some friends — Noa Hall and Pebble Brook — convinced him to talk to me because I was writing Cape Cod Modern. He was known for repelling people who would try to visit. His photos were around the house. Some are blown up and mounted on foam core. So I had a sampling of his pictures that I used in my book — people sitting on the porch and stuff — but that’s a tiny tip of the iceberg. He had shows when he was younger. One was at Cherrystone Gallery in Wellfleet. I’ve started to sort the contact sheets into subjects: the house’s interior, exterior, the landscape, the beach, downtown Wellfleet, and then the different families, from the Chermayeffs to the Phillipses, descendants of Jack Phillips, the self-taught designer and architect who built some of the first modern homes on the Cape and brought people like Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim to town. I’ve recorded Zoom meetings with as many people from those families as I can find, and in many cases, these are the best pictures of their families that were ever taken, and nobody’s seen them. So it’s this crypto history of this community, a giant vault that was never opened.

RH: Can you see the cottage changing in the photographs?

PM: The house was really a cabin to start. There was almost no furniture, and the furniture that was there was very low to the ground. There was a mattress on the living room floor that people used as a couch. There were tables that Breuer made that were only about 12 inches off the floor. It was very sparse. And then, slowly, things changed. The evolution of the interior is fascinating to me. At first, there were just tatami mats on the floor, and then he put in oak flooring, and then he and [his wife] Connie designed these beautiful rugs. He made lots of different kinds of furniture out of cement blocks. In the closet in the darkroom is his favorite cement block, which is this really tall one. He put it on his desk and used it to sort his mail. He had a very intimate relationship with cement blocks.

When Breuer designed the house 75 years ago, he was interested in vernacular architecture in Hungary, Germany, and France. But when he got to New England, he was very interested in the unadorned, white box that was a traditional federal. But what he most imitated was a more mercantile or maritime architecture. Breuer always really liked boats, which came into play with masts, spars, and cables. The home resembles a wharf or an oyster house. It’s more like a utilitarian mercantile structure than a house, like a pier sticking out in the water. It’s built kind of like a barn, with posts that go from the ground to the roof. The suspended porch is really interesting. It’s not exactly cantilevered. It’s like a suspended trust, half hanging and half braced from beneath. It’s very novel. I’ve never seen another structure like it.

RH: How do Tamás’s photos represent the landscape?

PM: They’re very illustrative of how it’s changed. The landscape around the house used to be very open, with fewer trees and this beautiful grass that grew everywhere, and you could see the ponds well. But some of the pines have gotten really large and are falling over. There’s this invasive catbriar, and four billion little oak trees. I’ve already started trying to clear some of that out where it’s allowed, picking up the dead pine trees and hiding them, making piles and covering them with brush so they will mulch. It’s hiding years of neglect. The Park Service, on their land, goes through and removes the understory — there are trees and ground cover, but they take down the middle layer, which is what the Wampanoags used to do. They would burn the understory once a year for hunting, and it wouldn’t affect the trees. I’m doing a lot of selective editing of the landscape. The forest is changing from a pine forest to an oak forest. The pines are on their way out, and the oaks are coming in.

RH: When I picture the landscape, I only think of those twisty pines. I haven't looked at it closely enough to notice the oaks coming in.

PM: Twisty Pines would be a good drag name.

RH: How else do you see the Cape changing through these images?

PM: Whole areas are gone due to erosion. There are pictures of the beach, and that whole section of land and road is gone. It’s all out to sea. There used to be lots of horses, even into the early ’80s. Teenagers would have these equestrian events down at the pier, where they would ride their horses and do show jumping. The town looks very old-timey in the photos. It looks almost like it did during the Depression or something. It was before real estate got very expensive. It was just much more of a sleepy situation. People had a lot of time, and they hung out with each other. You can see that in the images: people sitting around talking, drinking tea or martinis.

RH: Do you have a sense of how these architects and artists would work together when they were on the Cape? Or were they just hanging out all summer?

PM: They were architects and artists working on high-level work. Chermayeff, György Kepes, and Bernard Rodofsky were working on things that turned into major shows at MoMA, or books, courses at Harvard, or even ideas that turned into buildings. They were very productive. Many of them would work during the day, then come outside before dinner to play ping pong, drink, talk, or swim. Sometimes, they’d go home after, or out to a restaurant, or they’d eat together at someone’s house. They’d often argue about architecture, politics, and books. Edmund Wilson, whose daughter is still here in Wellfleet, had a frenemy relationship with Vladimir Nabokov, who would come stay with him. They would fight about Russian translations. They would have these big, public fights that would sometimes end up in the New York Times. It wasn’t all peaceful. It was often very acrimonious. Chermayeff would make people cry at dinner parties. They were often egomaniacs, but they were all very passionate about ideas and politics. There were Trotskyites, Stalinists. White Russians who were actually related to the Tsar lived here. There was a woman who was in the French Resistance and survived the concentration camps. Oftentimes, these people had already lived incredible lives before they made it to the Outer Cape.

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Update: The Breuer cottage renovation is expected to be completed July, 2025.

Thank you Peter McMahon / CCMHT

Images: Aaron A. Binaco

Words: Rachel Hahn

All content ©Cape Cod Compass, Sundial LLC 2025

Published in collaboration with DUNES.FYI