Winnifred Miller still remembers the day in 1950 that she fell hard for the house known as the Moon Residence, already drawing attention as a landmark of West Coast modernism. It listed at $14,000 – a price that was then so onerous that her husband Arthur Miller told his wife that the house was already sold. Ms. Miller was undeterred: "I said to him: 'Well, if it's sold, then we'll just have to buy it back,' "she recalls. "I wanted it!" They bought the house.
Now, six decades later, their 2,000-square-foot house is on the market for $1.38-million. Nestled in a densely shrubbed lot in Edgemont Village area of North Vancouver, the residence takes its sobriquet from first owner Jack Moon, who commissioned the house in 1950, but in an unlucky twist of fate, was transferred to a Calgary office and was forced to sell it just a few months after moving in.
The house's architect is the renowned Fred Hollingsworth, who still lives around the corner on Ridgewood Drive in his own self-designed architectural marvel. At 94, Mr. Hollingsworth is largely a homebody these days but his mind and spirit remain sharp. He smiles at the memory of this house and its kindred North Shore houses, built in the years after he settled in the neighbourhood in 1946. "This was the middle of nowhere back then; there was just a gravel road," he recalls, gesturing towards the street. "I built a bunch of those houses. It was a hexagon with the bottom squared off, so that there could be an advantage to having a 45-degree angle," he says. "That was kind of fun."
This kind of post-and-beam design with angular modules became known as Mr. Hollingsworth's Neoteric houses. As in the Moon/Miller Residence, the nucleus of his typical house plan is a giant brick hearth from which a series of angled wood modules radiate, illuminated by clerestory windows. The house is sited at a 45-degree angle on the lot, so that one corner juts sharply toward the street. The main form is composed of two wings of cedar board-and-batten modules that inflect the rooms and corridors with dynamic, surprising sightlines.
The angular modules propel you from room to room as you wander through the five-bedroom house. Their oblique lines generate a series of unusual niches for storage, hallways that read as meandering paths, and marvellously unexpected light patterns. And furniture, too: the dining room features a dogleg-shaped built-in wooden table whose form evokes the larger plan of the house itself.
The two main wings meet at an acute angle that generates an intimate outdoor patio space. Even 60 years after designing it, Mr. Hollingsworth remembers why he angled the house with its V-shaped corner jutting towards Edgemont Boulevard. "It was too close to the street, so I wouldn't otherwise get enough light to the south," he says.
The modified-hex layout is a takeaway from Mr. Hollingsworth's most important mentor, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1951, Mr. Hollingsworth spent time at Mr. Wright's famous Taliesen studio. You can see further Wrightian influences in the foyer's wooden torchières, which Mr. Hollingsworth himself crafted by hand. He also absorbed Mr. Wright's obsession with Japanese spatial arrangements, designing the Moon/Miller Residence with a network of clerestory windows and beams that criss-cross at various heights, creating poetic expanses of space at ceiling level. Composed in this way, the lighting is largely subdued and indirect, like a Caravaggio canvas. This is not a house for sun worshippers.
Compared to peers such as Arthur Erickson and Ned Pratt, Mr. Hollingsworth practised a more idiosyncratic brand of modernism, melding craft elements with the more austere postwar European modernism. So the Moon/Miller Residence boasts nonessential but lovely gestures like the jogged brickwork running up the huge fireplace wall.
Yet true to the modernist ideal, nothing is "tacked on": the decorative elements are integral parts of the architecture. The cantilevered wooden fins that serve as window mullions also double as miniature shelves to showcase the family's treasures – rocks, minerals, shells and whatever else they would find on their outdoor expeditions. "Our children used to collect everything under the sun, so this became the 'museum room'," says Ms. Miller as she walks through the back-of-the-house recreation room.
Realtor Simon Coutts puts it in lay terms: "It's just crazy how cool it is, when you look at the fireplace and walls and ceiling – there's really just a James Bond kind of cool everywhere." Mr. Coutts points out that it was one of the earliest houses to sport a concrete floor – a gesture would still be avant-garde several decades later. This one has an epoxy enamel finish that imbues it with a warm and refined quality.
But the Moon/Miller Residence is, above all, a West Coast house, crafted with local materials and sited to maximize the views of the lush green foliage outside. The material palette is almost entirely brick and wood, with the interior walls and cabinetry built with high-quality "matched-grain" plywood. The living room features a built-in upholstered banquette that scissors apart to follow the oblique angle of the wall. "This is my favourite spot: I like to sit here on the built-in bench and look up at the trees," says Ms. Miller.
The banquette is built into a wall that stands out as the defining feature of the house: a sheet of textured glass sandwiched between two brick walls with dozens of gaps that create small windows. These apertures offer no view to speak of, but give the living-room area an ethereal light, tinged green from the foliage outside. It's a favourite Hollingsworth gesture. But subdued lighting is not the only design intention behind the window-filled brick wall. Back at his Ridgewood Drive home, Mr. Hollingsworth smiles and leans forward to explain in what sounds like a conspiratorial whisper: "It's a nice thing when someone's coming up the drive and you can see them, but they can't see you." Then he chuckles heartedly.
Special to The Globe and Mail