A Week at Marcel Breuer’s Wellfleet Cottage

I recently had the privilege of spending a week in Marcel Breuer’s Wellfleet cottage—a sentence that doesn’t even feel real. Thanks to the Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT), a local nonprofit that purchased the house and spent two years restoring it, the house is now available for weekly summer rentals.

I had been following the status of the house ever since it went up for sale in 2023 and pestered the CCMHT with a “just checking in!” email every few months in the hopes of snagging a week at the house this summer. The harassment paid off; I was offered a week in late June and booked it immediately.

The Bauhaus-trained Breuer first came to Wellfleet in the early 1940s to visit his friend, architect Serge Chermayeff, who had recently built a house near what would become Breuer’s property. (On the winding roads to Breuer House, I took a wrong turn and actually ended up at Chermayeff’s house, which is beautiful, but private, so don’t go there!) The wild and rural road pays off: Breuer House is totally private and immersed in nature. At 1,700 square feet, the house is what one would consider small these days, but it never feels that way. It actually feels spacious, which is a testament to Breuer’s mastery of proportion, space, and light.

As one of the first renters of the house, I had a persistent feeling while staying there that this was too good to be true. Surely they won’t let people just… stay here? And even crazier, light fires, thumb through the cookbooks (annotated with grocery lists), and bask in the ambient light of their Taraxacum pendant (gifted by Castiglioni himself)? It felt like we had broken into a museum after hours and, at any moment, a security guard might arrive and tell us to go home. I’ve visited many modernist house museums—Eileen Gray’s E-1027, George Nakashima’s house in New Hope, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Russel Wright’s Manitoga—but I’ve never actually slept in one.

I handled the house with kid gloves. I tiptoed lightly on the porch for fear of putting too much pressure on the cantilevered structure (I know, I know). I laid a dish towel on a wood shelf before putting my toiletry case on it, just in case stray drops of water stained it. I opened and closed windows like I was handling the Mona Lisa. I was afraid of “hurting” the house.

One day during our stay, Peter McMahon, the director of the CCMHT, sent me a message. A significant donor was in town for one day, and he asked if they could visit the house. We, of course, said yes. During his tour, he pointed out the many pieces in the house that belonged to Breuer and his wife, Connie. I asked Peter, “Aren’t you worried about people staying here and messing up the house?” His response surprised me. Renters, he said casually, tend to be a self-selective group of people. “Everyone who stays here is either an architect or a modernist superfan.”

After Peter’s visit, I relaxed a bit. I’m still me, so I was hardly swinging from the chandeliers, but I let myself sink into the house without so much worry about its state. I played Connie’s piano. I used a mug without a coaster. We lit a fire on a chilly night. During an intense rainstorm, I worried about how it might batter the house, and then I remembered that the house had withstood many storms and blizzards before this and would continue to long after I left. This was part of what made my stay at Breuer House so special. I felt like I was a chapter in a long history.

Much of what was in the house, from the sofa down to the 1950s Vaughan’s can opener, had been there for decades, and I didn’t get the sense that Breuer was overly precious with any of it. The house had many layers of life—a thick patina from years of parties and houseguests. As a design obsessive—and a Virgo—I’m a bit neurotic with my home and belongings, and it was a nice reminder that it’s okay if things get a little scuffed and imperfect.

As we walked to our car to head home to New York, I turned around and took one last look at the house. After seven days in Breuer’s treehouse, my shoulders were relaxed. With ocean salt in my hair, dirt under my fingernails, mosquito bites on my legs, tan lines on my skin, I had been enveloped by nature and sent back to the city a tiny bit changed—more willing to let go and embrace the effect of time on things.

For more, or to book a stay at a Modernist cottage, head to CCMHT.

N.B.: All photography by Nicole Najafi, except where noted.