The Kugel/Gips House

Designed by Charlie Zehnder in 1970, the newly restored Kugel/Gips house is available for weekly rentals and residencies. Secluded in the privacy of the Cape Cod National Seashore, this significant example of the Outer Cape’s modernist architecture is nestled in the pine woods, hovering above the private, Northeast Pond. The three bedroom, two bathroom house has a large fireplace, two decks with sunset views and is furnished with mid-century designer furniture and art from the period. A short walk from Wellfleet’s ocean beaches and a restaurant / bar, the house provides an ideal private spot of reflection and recreation.

Charles Zehnder

Designer Charlie Zehnder came to the Cape in 1957 to help a friend build his house in Truro. Settling into Wellfleet, he bought some land on the bayside and started an architectural practice that ultimately produced over forty-five, immediately identifiable houses. Zehnder creatively cross-pollinated with the European modernists who had settled in area before him while maintaining his own idiosyncratic approach to residential design. His restless experimentation with geometries and materials led to a body of work remarkable for its intimate relationship with the Cape’s terrain, climate and lifestyle of informal creativity. The Kugel / Gips House reflects Zehnder’s fascination with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Its corners dematerialize through butt-glazed windows, horizontal planes are emphasized, and long cantilevered decks and roof overhangs project the living spaces into the landscape. The design demonstrates Zehnder’s great skill for inhabiting a site without overwhelming it.

CCMHT History

The Outer Cape comprises a unique landscape of beaches, pinewoods, tidal marshes and glacial ponds imbued with a brilliant quality of light that has drawn artists and writers since the nineteenth century.

Starting in the late 1930s, the Outer Cape attracted some of the prime movers of modern architecture, including architects Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff and Olav Hammarstrom and engineer Paul Weidlinger, who built houses for themselves, their friends and clients. Walter Gropius, Xanti Schawinski, Konrad Wachsmann, Constantino Nivola, the Saarinen family and Florence and Hans Knoll all either rented summer cottages or were frequent houseguests here. The vibrant community also included artists Gyorgy Kepes and Saul Steinberg as well as numerous writers and academics and their students.

This group of international refugees and their friends made a home for themselves in the secluded pinewoods of Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown; many are even buried here. This collection of creative people believed in the power of design to improve the human condition and to integrate man with nature. They applied those principles equally to the great projects they undertook in the world beyond Cape Cod and to their own cottages, which were sometimes made with salvaged material, Homasote and driftwood.

The Cape’s modern architects enjoyed a lifestyle based on communion with nature, solitary creativity (designing, painting, writing, sculpting) and communal festivity. Their houses embody this ethos with their blurring of indoors and outdoors, their isolated studios and outdoor spaces for evening parties. Serious work took place there, and ideas were often exchanged during long walks in the woods or while wading in a pond.

The tradition started in 1937, when Gropius and a close circle of his Bauhaus faculty and friends spent the summer on a small island at the base of the Cape, reprising their communal European holidays and trying to plot a new life for themselves in their adopted land. From there the members of the group spread out to transmit their revolutionary teachings, but they never lost their connection to the place.