The house, as shown in listing photos, has a wrap-around floating terrace that helps connect the indoors to the wooded two acres it sits on.
Photo: Compass
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is known for its modernist mid-century office towers like Lever House and the sleek skyscrapers it puts up all over the world. It is not a practice that most people would associate with a suburban single family home. But Arthur Witthoefft, an architect there, built a number of International Style homes in Westchester, including his own house and this five-bedroom, five-bath home at 9 Tallwoods Road in Armonk, which just listed for $3.275 million.
The circular fireplace, as shown in listing photos, sits in the middle of an open floorplan, with the bedrooms down a glass-walled corridor.
Photo: Compass
The Armonk five-bedroom, built in 1963, is remarkably well-preserved — the listing, held by Compass broker Brian Milton, says it’s only traded hands twice in its 52-year history. Although it seems to have been on the market relatively recently — in 2019. It’s unclear if it sold then or not. In any event, it doesn’t seem to have suffered any heavy-handed renovations since then.
The Armonk house sits on a large landscaped lot, as shown in listing photos, in the same Westchester suburb where the architect had built his own home a few years earlier.
Photo: Compass
The house is spacious, at 5,000 square feet, and located on a wooded, landscaped two acres, with a heated driveway and garage. In the style of the era, it blends the indoors and outdoors with floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides and a domed atrium that lights the interior of the house. Upstairs, each of the bedrooms and bathrooms open out onto the wraparound terrace that seems to float on both floors of the house and expands into a rounded patio on the ground floor. The main living area is open plan, with the original, circular fireplace, and there is a series of bedrooms off a corridor that is glass on one side. The lower level, down a spiral stair, has a recreation room and guest suite that look as spacious and polished as the rooms upstairs. Some of the finishes, particularly in the bedrooms, whose walls range from light to dark gray, may not be to every buyer’s taste (there is something corporate in the gleaming laminate surfaces of the kitchen, among other interior design choices), but that’s not particularly difficult to change. (Witthoefft’s own recently restored home in Armonk is full of bright, cheerful colors.) And other features, like the primary bath with boxy dual sinks and a Japanese soaking tub, are kind of delightfully retro.
Armonk, a Westchester suburb, is only about a 45 minute commute from Manhattan. While Westchester now has a number of notable mid-century homes on wooded lots like this one, when Witthoefft built his house, a few years before this one, mid-century modern architecture was such a rarity in Armonk that the neighbors apparently thought it was going to be a motel.