A Forgotten Philip Johnson Home Gets a New Lease on Life

When Jiminie Ha, the senior director of graphic design at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and artist Jeremy Parker stumbled on a real estate listing for a house in Newburgh, New York, it cited, almost as an afterthought, that the property had been designed by controversial giant of 20th-century architecture Philip Johnson.

The home no longer resembled Johnson’s initial design of two stacked boxes—a smaller brick box with a larger cypress-clad box perched atop it, jutting out over a ground-floor patio and grassy slope overlooking the Hudson River.

Recent owners renovated and had all but forsaken Johnson’s original vision. The exterior wood paneling had been extended to reach the ground and obscure the brickwork on the first floor, and a porch had been added to the second-floor dining room. "They brought the exterior all the way to the ground," explains Jeremy. "So you lose that first story kind of floating above the second story. And it was also painted—as I joke with Jiminie—a gender-reveal blue.

Nevertheless, "his ghost was haunting this place," says Jiminie.