Three Modern Home Demolition-Alerts in NC

Headed for destruction unless quickly purchased, you can buy one of these three livable works of art and keep them from doom.


ALERT 1: Are you the ultimate tinkerer? Good with tools? Want a house for $14,000? The Collins Street Lustron in Nashville NC, less than an hour from Raleigh, is owned by the church next door which needs a new parking lot. 

This classic 1950’s prefab house will be carted off to the dump within two weeks unless you act now.  The demolition contractor hired recently by the church, Lane Johnson, has become a big Lustron fan and has offered a short “stay of execution.”  Lane will painstakingly disassemble the modular Lustron (like an erector set) and put it on a truck for $14,000. 

That’s an entire house, delivered to you, for the cost of a car. He’ll even get you the assembly manual. Bring this bad boy to your backyard! For more information, contact Tobias please.




ALERT 2: It takes a special kind of person to design and build their own home from scratch, and Raleigh city planner John Voorhees did just that in 1961.  

2727 North Mayview is wildly central inside Raleigh, just off Brooks Avenue. You could not get a better location. 

The owners have put the property on the market as a lot, which means certain death for this unique Modernist home. No doubt about it, the house needs some work, but can be saved by the right person. $269,900. For more information, contact Tobias please. 

ALERT 3: As reported earlier, News 14 Carolina picked up TMH's national preservation alert for A.G. Odell’s Lassiter House in Charlotte, NC. 

Steel beams support the roof and eliminate the need for load-bearing interior walls, thereby enabling large open spaces to predominate throughout the interior. 

A particularly ingenious scheme was an arrangement whereby the dining table could be set in the kitchen, complete with food and adornments, and slid through the wall into the dining room.  Appeared in Better Homes and Gardens September 1956. Charles McMurray did an addition in the 1970's. Included a saltwater pool at one point. In need of major renovations.

Unless sold, this unique modernist house will be demolished in June. 3 BR, 2.5 baths, $785,000. Watch the video, and contact Tobias for more information please.
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Via Triangle Modernist Houses

Modern Architecture in North Carolina

My wife and I returned from a long weekend in North Carolina, and we are impressed.

There is an incredible trove of modern architecture in NC's Triangle region (see article below), which I was completely unaware about. Plus great BBQ, people so friendly it made my wife and I wonder why they are the way they are, nice vineyards (we bought RayLen again; expecially the 2006 Cab exceeded our expecations) and great roads for motorcycle riding. I suppose I'm just so easy to please.

Staying in Winston-Salem with close friends who are also relatives, we twice drove 1.5h over to Raleigh. One day we had the good fortune to speak with two extremely hospitable and friendly realtor colleagues, Anne Hughes and Roger Kenny of Re/Max Integrity in Cary, who gave us great insights into the Cary/Raleigh housing market.

Another day we attended a workshop on preservation easements, under the perspective how they could be used to preserve modern architecture. Afterwards we had lunch with the organiser of the event, George Smart, the founder of Triangle Modernist Houses. TMH is a non-profit organisation which aims to protect and promote modern homes in the Triangle region of North Carolina, an area formed by the cities Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill (the mystical city "Raleigh-Durham" seems to be the airport's fault, which is called RDU or Raleigh-Durham). A nice piece in the NYT on the area: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/travel/14hours.html

George Smart and TMH leave me amazed and speechless. These folks - George, the board, the advisory council and the volunteers at TMH - have their act together, big time. They research, they find, they photograph, they list, they run the website, they do house tours and now field trips. Incredible. In comparison, I feel rather lonely in SE Florida with my passion, sometimes wondering if there are any other like-minded modernist fools like me bumbling about.

So, bumbling fools, please speak up!