An architectural gem, still a home

Architect Alfred Dragani and his wife, Concetta, an art historian, were at a Chestnut Hill dinner party six years ago when they learned that the house next door was for sale - and their ears perked up.

The house, designed in 1957 in two glassy pavilions by Swiss architect Oskar Stonerov, was a rare gem - a modern house on a street dominated by modern architecture in the middle of Victorian Chestnut Hill. A devotee of the International Style of architecture, Stonerov advocated clean, sparse designs and community connections as espoused by the writings of French architect Le Corbusier - whom Alfred Dragani had admired since being a graduate architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s.

At the time of that dinner party, the Draganis were living in a large, old house in the northern part of Chestnut Hill that required constant upgrades and renovations, and the family was looking for a home that was less expensive to maintain - their three children planned to attend private school.

The 2,500-square-foot house offered that, as well as a place in architectural history.

On the former estate of 19th-century developer Henry Houston, the house was part of a nine-year Stonerov project that included the 104-unit Cherokee Village development, a walkable community adjacent to the Wissahickon woods, and a few private homes. Besides its notable architect and developer, the house had been owned for 10 years in the 1970s by Ian McHarg, a famous landscape designer.

But the house still needed work, and the project was embraced by the whole family.

The yard had to be replanted, and the couple's sons, now 18 and 20, planted a beech tree and removed the overgrown stuff, Concetta Dragani said.

On the interior, the couple wanted to restore the original Stonerov design - covered with layers of previous owners' additions - and reclaim it as a "machine for living," a Le Corbusier phrase that compares the function of a home to something like a car.

See the rest here:
An architectural gem, still a home