Your New Favorites: 10 Mid-Century Modern Homes by Renowned Architects

Andreia Alves

Mid-century is the new black every one, let’s keep this style alive!

Mid-Century modern is an architectural, interior, product, and graphic design that generally describes mid-20th-century developments in modern design, architecture, and urban development from roughly 1933 to 1965. It’s now time to take a look at your newest passion: our top 10 mid-century modern homes!

Get Inspired Here: GET INSPIRED BY THESE CELEBRITY HOMES INTERIOR DESIGN!

These masterpieces of modern architecture are still influencing home design today — dive in this search for new home decor elements (we know you are looking for it)!

Lovell Beach House

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The Lovell Beach House was built in 1926 by Rudolph M. Schindler in Newport Beach, California. Well, you can try to visit, but we have to warn you that only rare visits are scheduled. In this third residence that R.M. Schindler designed for Philip Lovell (a lover of modern architecture if there ever was one, for he also commissioned Richard Neutra to design a house), he raised the house on five sculptural columns to gain ocean views over neighboring buildings.

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The bravado structure also responds to seismic considerations and survived an earthquake five years after completion, one that destroyed a nearby school. Schindler worked for Frank Lloyd Wright previously, and that influence can be found in some details, but with this house design, the architect crafted his own personal modern style.

Gropius House

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The Gropius House was built in 1937 by architect Walter Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts. This amazing mid-century house is available for self-guided tours, so don’t waste your time and give it a visit! Walter Gropius, who had founded the influential Bauhaus School in Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1937.

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He taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and designed this house for his family in nearby Lincoln. Its ribbon windows and white surfaces express a Bauhaus aesthetic, but underneath can be found strong regional influences.

Eames House, Case Study House No. 8 

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The Eames House was built in 1949 by the amazing architects Charles and Ray Eames in Pacific Palisades, California. If you wanted to give it a visit, you should know that this house design is reserved for self-guided exterior tours only.

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Although this house/studio for designers Charles and Ray Eames is simply two rectangular volumes made of off-the-shelf steel structures and windows, it is a colorful expression of their design sensibility and a suitable backdrop for their collections and creations. It is also sensitively merged into the sloping site, showing that the house is as much about place as about universal modern ideals.

Gamble House

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The Gamble House was built in 1908 by Greene and Greene in the beautiful Pasadena, California. This house is a masterpiece of the Greene brothers’ synthesis of styles and means — Arts and Crafts, art nouveau, Japanese timber construction, bungalows.

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Many people are familiar with the house from the film Back to the Future, as its exterior served as Doc’s mansion (the interiors were filmed at a different Green and Greene house), but it deserves to be known by everybody on the merits of its well-crafted wood architecture, inside and out.

Glass House

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The pretty glass house was built in 1949 by the architect Philip Johnson in New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson was as much, if not more so, a proponent of architectural styles as an interior designer of them. He and Henry Russell Hitchcock, in their 1932 International Style of Modern Architecture exhibition at MoMA, helped to define what people think modern architecture is, even to this day.

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His Glass House, influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (next) but completed two years before it, is the first of many structures Johnson designed and built on his New Canaan estate. Many of the later buildings embody other styles, but this house is explicitly and unabashedly modern.

Farnsworth House

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The Farnsworth House was built in 1951 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohein Plano, Illinois. Like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe emigrated to the United States before World War II, arriving in Chicago and heading the Illinois (then Armour) Institute of Technology.

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His influence on postwar architecture is massive, but mainly on the design of office towers and other urban buildings. Next to the Fox River, west of Chicago, he designed a raised glass box that turned out to be his last residential commission, after Edith Farnsworth sued her architect. She echoed van der Rohe’s famous dictum in her statement, “Less is not more. It is simply less!”

Villa Mairea

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Villa Mairea was built in 1939 by architect Alvar Aalto in Noormarkku, Finland. This Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, was given almost total freedom by Harry and Maire Gullichsen for the design of their summer home. Aalto, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1939 — Aalto saw it in project form in journals), striving for a design that was Finnish but modern.

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The resulting two-story, L-shaped house is an idiosyncratic design that expresses what British architect Colin St. John Wilson called “the other tradition of modern architecture,” which placed humanism above ideology.

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Villa Savoye

Your New Favorites 10 Mid-Century Modern Homes by Renowned Architects

Villa Savoye was built in 1931 by Le Corbusier in Poissy, France. This weekend house near Paris for Pierre and Emilie Savoye has become one of modern architecture’s key icons, residential or otherwise.

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It perfectly encapsulates Le Corbusier’s five points that he developed in the 1920s: raising the building on pilotis(slender columns), a free facade that was independent of the structural system, ribbon windows based on a similar logic, an open floor plan, and a roof garden that regained the ground lost through the building’s occupation of the landscape.

Frederick C. Robie House

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Frederick C. Robie House was built in 1909 by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. One aspect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius was the need to constantly reinvent himself and his architecture, perfecting a type of design and then moving on to something else.

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The Robie House can be seen as the apotheosis of his Prairie style, which he started to develop in the early 1890s and abandoned in favor of his democratic, Usonian designs. The low-slung house perfectly embodies the horizontal relationship of the house to a landscape of Wright’s organic architecture.

Schröder House

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Schröder House was built in 1924 by Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht, Netherlands. At first glance, Gerrit Rietveld’s design for Schröder House is like a painting come to life. Traditional ideas of construction and enclosure, outside and inside, don’t appear; in their place are lines, planes, and splashes of color.

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These traits also apply to furniture that Rietveld designed, pointing to the synthesis that he and his Dutch contemporaries realized through the short-lived De Stijl (“the style”) movement.

Get The Mid-Century Look

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Get Inspired Here: INTERIOR DESIGN INSPIRATIONS: HOW TO GET A MID-CENTURY MODERN HOME

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