Raccoons, dead trees and failed building materials: How a Cape group saved an iconic house

On a gloomy Tuesday morning, the wooden cantilever decks and white concrete-blocked beams of the Kugel/Gips house blend in with the overcast tones of the day. Overlooking the Northeast pond, the house is hidden in thick woods down a winding dirt road off Long Pond Road in Wellfleet.

Built by architect Charlie Zehnder in 1970, it is one of four homes restored and rented by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, a non-profit organization on the Cape founded by Peter McMahon in 2007.

The Kugel/Gips house will be open to the public to tour during an open house from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 29. Parking is on-site and the event is free to attend. Visit www.ccmht.org/ for more information.

As we wandered around, the grey from outside followed us in through the large windows covering the house. The earth-toned furniture — including Cesca dining chairs by Marcel Breuer, a dining room table crafted by McMahon and a Herman Miller Noguchi coffee table — and the dark-colored accent wall of the living room brought life to the white and wood-toned home.

McMahon pointed out Zehnder's design quirks inside the home, like the misalignments of windows and walls and the window above the kitchen sink — a design element he came to know spending his summers on Wellfleet in a Zehnder house.

"I grew up in a Charlie Zehnder house which is part of how I got onto this whole thing," he said.

Charlie Zehnder's Kugel/Gips house on Wellfleet's Northeast Pond

The three-bed, two-bath house was built for Peter Kugel, former chair of the Computer Science Department at Boston College and then later sold to James Gips, a computer scientist at Boston College at the end of its lease. When McMahon acquired the house in 2007, it had been abandoned by humans for 11 years but taken over by bats and raccoons.

“It was a real mess but you could sort of see the potential of it,” McMahon said.

It was his first project after establishing the trust that same year and he was up for a challenge. The painted latex roof had failed. Water filled the basement. Dead pine trees outside of the home threatened to fall on it. Plumbing and electrical issues topped off a long list of problems.

Though most of the restoration was finished within a year, getting the house to a completed state would take years as new problems kept popping up, largely due to Zehnder's use of materials.

"It took a long time to get (it) to a truly habitable state," McMahon said. "We have done a lot of improvements ... He used materials in a way that was kind of really pushing them to the limit and sometimes to the point where they failed."

Zehnder left his mark around the Outer Cape creating homes for clients who were professors, artists and writers with a small budget to build a home.

“I found 53 houses by him on the Outer Cape," McMahon said. "He was the most prolific of the modern architects ... He used usual materials in unusual ways … So he did some really interesting houses for what would be considered ridiculously low-budget nowadays.”

Yet, Zehnder never studied architecture, opting for engineering at the University of Virginia and sculpting at the Rhode Island School of Design. However, he grew to have an admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, especially after meeting him during his time at the University of Virginia.

“He had a very strong affinity for Wright and you can really see it in this house,” McMahon said. “It's got a lot of (Frank Lloyd Wright) aspects to it. The big overhangs, the cantilevers, the sort of projection out into the landscape and the dematerializing of the corners.”

Even as you step inside, Wright’s influence cannot be avoided as the brick fireplace sits center in the house, one of Wright’s signature design staples, according to McMahon.

Now, the Kugel/Gips house acts as a place for the trust's programming and tours, a home for their artists in residence during their stays in Wellfleet, and one of four of the trust's weekly vacation rentals.

"They're small by today's standards but very at one with their surroundings and with nature," McMahon said. "They're very bold in as far as how they handle materials and spaces ... They're very inspiring ... It just shows that there (are) other ways to live than just a normal suburban house."

Editor's note: This story was changed Oct. 25 to fix a typographical error in architect Charlie Zehnder's name and to correct a reporter's error on where James Gips worked. He was a computer scientist at Boston College.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Tour inside this Charlie Zehnder house on Northeast Pond in Wellfleet