In historic towns where the Revolutionary War began, modernist enclaves abound

Lexington and Concord have plenty of the historic homes you might expect.

Colonial residences line streets throughout historic Massachusetts towns, tidily wrapped in clapboard siding and topped with shingled roofs. But amid the Colonials are houses that you might not expect: pods of midcentury modern communities dating to the 1940s.

When Sheldon Decker and his partner began searching for a single-family home in 2017, they were “very specifically” looking for a midcentury modern house. They were leaving New York City behind and eyeing Lexington, where their kids could have access to a good school system and more outdoor space. The search brought them to a midcentury modern development dubbed Peacock Hill, and the couple quickly realized that the neighborhood “really is a world unto itself.”

“It is wooded; it does not have manicured lawns or very tidy landscapes,” Decker said. “It’s very natural, and the houses are not all in a row along the street.”

The style appealed to Decker and his family, who sought an alternative to “the traditional Colonial houses that you see all around Lexington.” Although the Colonials are beautiful, Decker said, they wanted a house engaged with nature and tucked within the landscape “as opposed to sort of being built upon it as a monumental architecture.”

Even “turning the corner on the development was really a wonderful experience,” he said.

Naturally, they bought the house.

Although many have been updated and restored over the years, some of the Colonial homes in Lexington and Concord predate America’s Revolutionary War, which began with the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord. Every third Monday of April, Massachusetts commemorates the battles on Patriots' Day.

Nearly two centuries after the Revolutionary War began, however, the towns got their modernist homes in part thanks to their proximity to Boston and Cambridge.

Those longstanding centers of higher education and research, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also sheltered a vibrant design community: Building-obsessed students flocked to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and MIT’s architecture school, with some flexing their muscles in nearby areas after graduation. The professors leading these programs got in on the fun, too; professional practice and personal projects often accompanied pedagogy, further texturing the region’s architecture scene.

And as the U.S. emerged from World War II in 1945, these architects picked at the frameworks surrounding housing and community in America, tinkering with a new concept that became Lexington’s Six Moon Hill.

Started in 1947 and completed in 1953 by The Architects Collaborative, the experimental development encompassed 28 single-family houses unified by open design and shared public space. Although just two years old, the Cambridge-based TAC was founded by design heavyweight Walter Gropius — then director of Harvard’s design school and the former director of Germany’s Bauhaus — alongside younger architects Jean Bodman Fletcher, Norman Fletcher, John Harkness, Sarah Harkness, Robert S. McMillan, Louis McMillan and Benjamin Thompson.

“The original objective was to provide work for the new firm and housing for the TAC architects and their families,” wrote Lexington resident and historian Anne Grady in the 2009 title "Buildings of Massachusetts." “Norman Fletcher said: ‘There was a strong conviction at TAC that ideal communities go far toward preventing social conflict … [The intention] was to create a genuine neighborhood of well-designed houses in a cooperative spirit.’”

The firm spread the starter homes across a 20-acre plot, orienting each one in keeping with the sloping landscape and embracing details that included vertical softwood siding, expansive glazing, and flat roofs. It shared a central park, and the neighborhood proved both a success and an inspiration: TAC built a 68-home development dubbed Five Fields in South Lexington in 1951, the same year that Danforth Compton and Walter Pierce started work on Peacock Farm, a 65-house development near Six Moon Hill. Architect Carl Koch — who’d completed a 1941 modernist development in Belmont dubbed Snake Hill — got in on the fun, putting up a 1950s complex of “Techbuilt” prefab homes in Lexington, and he collaborated with MIT’s Rupert Mclaurin on 102 houses spread along 190 acres in Concord.

In the decades since their completion, the homes have maintained their popularity, although their limited supply means they’re more of a collector's item than a starter home.

“The market for these homes in this area is doing very well, just as the market is for most homes right now because the inventory is very low and demand is still quite high in the metro Boston area,” said Bill Janovitz, an agent who founded a midcentury-focused brokerage dubbed Modern Mass in partnership with broker John Tse. On a price-per-square-foot basis, he continued, houses in these midcentury communities tend to sell for “a bit higher because they tend not to be gigantic houses and they’re in very good locations.” Recently, the firm's comparable listings range from about $1 to $2 million, with a Koch Snake Hill home trading for $2.3 million in 2023 and a midcentury ranch in Lexington selling for $2.2 million on April 2, according to Homes.com.

Originally, homes in these midcentury neighborhoods hovered around 1,200 square feet with three bedrooms and one to two bathrooms. Design-wise, these open-plan residences prioritized adaptability and an indoor-outdoor connection, but they went beyond that, said Pierce, the Peacock Farm creator. He bristled at calling modernism a “style.”

“Don’t call it a 'style,'” Pierce told Janovitz in a 2011 interview before his death. “There’s got to be a better term. For practicing architects, it should not be about a style; it’s a way of thinking — [a] rational way of approaching the design of a house.”

Anecdotally, he’s also seen the cohort of buyers interested in these houses and their rationality evolve over the course of his career. In addition to attracting a different age demographic as the homes increase in price, there’s also “been more of an international buyer pool,” Janovitz said, and influence from Silicon Valley transplants as the Boston area gains prominence as an East Coast tech hub.

“With Boston having this almost direct back-and-forth with Silicon Valley, where there’s a good history of [modernist houses] … we’re seeing people come from there as well that really like this whole thing,” Janovitz said.

The buyers Janovitz encounters often seek out these midcentury homes; they rarely stumble into them, he said. “What we’re finding is that people want to live in this sort of house.”

There are some design-focused buyers who look to purchase one of these houses wherever they can afford it, but most of the pool, he noted, prioritizes the proximity to Boston and Cambridge and the access to good school systems that these neighborhoods offer.

Since he started in his career around 2004, some 50 years after many of these communities were completed in Lexington and Concord, Janovitz has “seen an appreciation of these houses and the history and the pedigree and just midcentury modern in general really kind of spike up and people be able to afford them as they get older.”

As the market changes and interest in midcentury design broadens across social media, these communities still capture their fair share of architects and designers.

Sheldon Decker, the Peacock Farm buyer, is an architectural designer, and he ended up renovating his home at 7 Trotting Horse Drive. He and his family loved the split-level house and the way that the untouched Pierce design was built right into the sloping hill, but the residence was “definitely run-down,” Decker said. “It required an overhaul.”

Over the next three years, that overhaul encompassed everything from updating the unseen elements — think insulation, plumbing and mechanical systems — to refinishing and modernizing the materials and fixtures throughout.

The original asymmetrical profile remained of course, but the Deckers expanded the living spaces slightly and added a bath on the main level, making it a three-bathroom house for value and convenience. On the outside, they reclad the home in clearcoat stained siding, but they used vertical cedar siding, mirroring the original material.

Even with the updates, the Deckers maintained the home’s bones by choice and covenant; like many of these now-historic midcentury neighborhoods, Peacock Farm has an active homeowners association and rules about what can and cannot be altered or added. The limitations, which attract a certain kind of homeowner and repel others, are intentional. For example: no fences or hedges.

“That was part of making sure that the nature flowed through the neighborhood and that the neighbors had access to each other,” he said.

The Deckers, who settled into their home in 2020, are moving again, so 7 Trotting Horse is on the market for roughly $2.8 million. Decker is originally from Toronto and is heading back to Canada after 25 years in the United States, prompted by “developments and conflicts in the world right now” and by a desire to be near family.

“There’s a push and a pull happening that is having us move on to a new phase in our lives, which I think we’re looking forward to,” he explained. The family has put a lot of love into the home, and they hope that its next owners “will be able to enjoy the space and home as much as we have.”

Decker, who is this year’s president of the Peacock Farm Association, sees how the architecture of each home fosters a modernist “philosophy of living.”

“It sounds very highfalutin and snooty, but at the same time I think there’s definitely a point,” Decker explained. The flow of interior space and expansive windows, which let residents' eyes roam, can change the way a person socializes. Similarly, materials and layout influence one’s daily habits and routines, he said, “so I think there is a larger picture other than thinking of this as a style.”