In 2017, the architect Sirkka Damora was 93, widowed, and trying to find someone to save her house. She and her late husband, the modernist architectural photographer Robert Damora, had lived in Philip Johnson’s Booth House in Bedford, New York, since 1955. The title was in litigation. The house had no landmark designation. Her son Matt posted a plea to Docomomo US at the time: she wanted “appreciative stewards” more than she wanted money.
She got a buyer that year, but the new owners acquired two adjacent lots and reportedly planned to build a new home on the site before changing course. The house went back on the market in September 2024. Recently, Booth House was acquired by architect Drew Lang, founder of Lang Architecture; and builder Ravi Arps, founder of Plane Remodeling. The acquisition is the inaugural project of RnD, a new “design-led development firm” focused on “architecturally significant restorations.” After an 18-month restoration the house will return to the market.
Booth House was built in 1946 for the advertising executive Richard Booth and his wife Olga as a weekend retreat. Sited on a two-acre wooded lot at 319 Pound Ridge Road, the 1,440-square-foot structure is a concrete-block-and-plate-glass pavilion supported by steel framing, sitting on a low grass podium. Its plan revolves around a masonry fireplace, with glass walls in every direction.
The concrete block is unusual for Johnson, and Landis Gores, a member of the Harvard Five who collaborated on the project. Gores called it a “cross-breed in concrete block” between Johnson’s Harvard thesis work and Le Corbusier’s De Mandrot house. Johnson himself told Robert A. M. Stern later: “It’s funny, you get an idea early on in your work and it persists… it carried right through from the Booth House.”
Johnson, the first Pritzker laureate and the curator who co-organized the 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at MoMA with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, effectively named what became known as the International Style and spent the rest of his career building inside it. His legacy has been under reappraisal since 2020, when his ties to fascism, antisemitism, and white supremacy circulated.
Booth predates the Glass House in New Canaan by three years but shares its DNA: the podium, the glazing, the central fireplace. What Booth has that Glass House doesn’t: walls, private rooms, storage, and space for a life, which is how the Damoras ended up raising a family inside it for 55 years.
Robert Damora understood the house he was living in. A Guggenheim Fellow and AIA Gold Medalist for Architectural Photography, he spent 70 years photographing Gropius, Mies, Kahn, and Johnson himself. Sirkka was an architect. They bought Booth House in the 1960s and extended it downward, adding a below-grade level with a sunken courtyard and a studio.
Robert died in 2009. The house was listed in 2010 at $2 million, in 2017 at $1 million, and in 2024 at $1.9 million.
Booth House is not on the National Register. It is not in a Bedford local historic district. “Unlike Johnson’s Glass House, the Booth House is not a protected historic site,” Compass agent Melissa Marcogliese said last year. Whatever Lang and Arps restore, the next owner can undo. The difference between keeping a building standing and carrying it forward is the whole question.
RnD describes its approach as “bringing design and delivery under one accountable standard.” The restoration “will be documented throughout,” and the goal, Lang and Arps write, is “architecture that is not simply preserved as an artifact, but carried forward as a living, lasting work,” offering its eventual buyer “a rare opportunity to inhabit a foundational piece of American modernism.” Their model starts by acquiring architecturally significant houses, restoring them, and returning them to the market.