After a Herculean Renovation, Architect Wallace Harrison’s Landmarked Home Seeks a New Caretaker

Wallace Harrison designed Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House, the McGraw-Hill Building, the Time & Life Building, the Exxon Building, and the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. He also had a substantial hand in the creation of Rockefeller Center and the United Nations Headquarters, but you can’t live in any of those places. You can, however, live in the architect’s exceptionally graceful summer home in Melville on Long Island, respectfully and tastefully restored and expanded by the firm SchappacherWhite and currently for sale for $5,999,000. 

Harrison purchased the site in 1931, living initially in the innovative Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher–designed Aluminaire House, which he had acquired and carted off to this property after its initial exhibition. Over the next decade or so, he built a house of his own in a number of stages, adding on rooms and annexing outbuildings, including a caretaker’s cottage and stables (The Aluminaire House eventually departed and is now in sunny retirement in the hands of the Palm Springs Art Museum). 

Harrison described the residence as "an exercise in how to fit circles together," producing an irregular design of several curved volumes alternating with geometric wings. The interiors provide winning views of the home’s eight woodsy acres, terraced hillside landscaping, a pond, and  a miniature golf course.

He is believed to have found inspiration for the showcase living room—with its 16-foot ceiling, capacious window bay, terrazzo tiling, and wooden dance floor—in his work on the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, but he also experimented with things at home before he built them elsewhere (no surprise for an architect with a studio down the hall).

Harrison was well connected, linked by marriage to the Rockefellers and spending much of his career as court architect to that family, but his great talent brought him into eminent company of all sorts. Artists were frequent guests at the home: Marc Chagall and Alexander Calder came by repeatedly, and the latter is rumored to have had his first show at the property. There’s a Mary Callery sculpture on the living room wall, prudently moved inside by the current homeowners. Fernand Léger lived at the house for a time, designing an ethereal skylight in the current dining room, and was thought to have painted the bottom of the pool.