Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1267

Breuer House II is currently on the market in New Canaan, Connecticut for $5.85 million . The house has 4 bedrooms, 4 full bathrooms, and 2 half bathrooms. It is 4,777 square feet and sits on 3.11 acres of land.

Originally built in 1951, the house was designed by the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained, and Harvard-teaching modernist architect, Marcel Breuer . It served as their family home until 1975 , after which time it was sold and almost demolished. Thankfully it was instead purchased, restored, and expanded (by another Harvard architect ).

Marcel Breuer was a member of what is known as the Harvard Five . They were a group of five architects who either taught at or went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and who had moved out to New Canaan to build experimental modern homes starting in the 1940s. Homes like Philip Johnson’s Glass House .

Seeing the Breuer House II listed for sale this morning reminded me of how cool it must have been at the time for a bunch of radical architects to move out to a sleepy New England town and start building modernist boxes. I’m sure it pissed off more than a few people.

Does anyone know of anything similar to this happening today? :)

Image from Modern Homes Survey

I’ve written quite a few posts about family formation and, more specifically, about where Millennials will move once they start having kids . 

Many seem to believe that – despite the current Millennial love affair with urban centers – much of this cohort is destined to repeat the pattern of the previous generation. Meaning, once the kids come along, they’re headed to the suburbs in search of bigger and more affordable housing.

If you look at the data, there’s a lot to support this prediction. Below is an interesting chart from Nathanael Lauster (Professor in Sociology at the University of British Columbia) that looks at net migration by age group for the City of Vancouver and the metro area.

What this chart shows is a flood of people in their late teens and early 20s migrating into the city (many of which are likely students), but then a fairly dramatic net loss of people leaving the city as they enter their 30s. The metro area, however, continues to grow – almost certainly because of people looking for more suitable family housing.

But this data is from 2006-2011. We don’t yet have the 2016 census data. And I suspect that we will start to see an increase in the number of people opting to remain in the city across many different urban centers. 

There are some very real economic pressures that successful cities today have to contend with. But I believe that the desire to remain in the city is there for a lot of young people.

I first learned about the work of Jonathan Segal back when I was in architecture school. And he was somebody I immediately admired. 

At the time, I was struggling to figure out where I wanted to position myself between architecture and real estate development, and he was somebody who had seemingly figured it all out: he simply merged the two.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Jonathan Segal, he has made a name for himself by being a pioneer of the “ Architect as Developer ” business model. That is, he acts as both the architect and the developer/client.

This business model isn’t going to suit everyone, but I suspect that we’ll see more of it in the future.

Of course, it doesn’t just have to be an architect acting as a developer. It could also be an architect and a developer joining forces or some other permutation. Whatever the case may be, design and innovation are central to business today and that’s why I think this model will only become more relevant.

Below is a short 3 ½ minute video about Segal’s latest project, called Mr. Robinson. It is located in San Diego. If you can’t see the video below, click here .

[vimeo 155403927 w=500 h=211]

If you’d like to see the typical floor plans or rent one of the apartments (they start at $2,400/month), click here .

Now I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Do you like the project?