Dave Brubeck and Lola Brubeck were already living in one contemporary design wonder when they decided to create a second. It was the 1950s, and the jazz icon, Dave Brubeck, was always on the road with his band, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. “The whole bunch would pack into my father’s Kaiser Vagabond, drive across the nation, and play, play, play,” says Chris Brubeck, the couple’s third son.
The majority of the engagements were on the East Coast, which meant Dave Brubeck was gone for weeks at a time from his home in Oakland, California. “‘What if we lived on the East Coast?’ Mom and Dad wondered.” ‘How much more time do you think you’d have at home with your family?'” The answer is “a lot.”
The Heartwood House, as it was known, featured sweeping views of San Francisco Bay and was praised for its striking facade. In a commercial praising the strength of its beams, Bethlehem Steel included “Dave Brubeck and his ‘Tree House.'” Ed Sullivan recorded the quartet in their living room for a feature on his show.
In 1961, they purchased a hilly site in Wilton, Connecticut, overlooking two streams, and commissioned Beverley David Thorne, the architect who had designed their Oakland home, to create a house that would make use of the topography. Thorne had previously encountered a similar issue on the couple’s steep and rocky California property, where he employed metal I-beams to cantilever the structure out over the slope.
Thorne participated in the 1945 Case Study Houses initiative, which employed architects after WWII to construct family homes out of low-cost, readily accessible materials. His Case House Number 26, a long rectangle with a glass wall that looked out over a hillside near San Rafael, California, was appreciated but received little attention.
Dave Brubeck embodied many American dreams: he was a rancher turned jazz great who was also a loving family man. He grew up riding horses on his father’s cattle ranch, and he studied veterinary surgery and music at the College of the Pacific, where he met his wife, lyricist Iola Whitlock, with whom he had six children.
Architects of Thorne’s generation were fond of talking about bringing the outside in. According to Chris, this occurred visually and physically at the Wilton mansion. Every day, his father would practise the piano for hours, and the sound would draw interested neighbours, including, for a while, a wild animal. “A fox would come and sit on the flagstones just outside the sliding door beside the piano and listen to Dad play when he was in his eighties.”
Along with the streams, the Wilton property had a pond, a waterfall, and open and forested areas. Thorne combined glass, steel, and natural stone to build a structure that immerses its residents in the surrounding scenery, as he had done in California. The kitchen, dining room, laundry, and guest bedroom are on the top floor; the living room is down half a level, and the music studio and other bedrooms are a half level below that.
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