You can't really see it from the road. And even if it weren't sheltered from Bradley Boulevard by a grove of beneficent trees, it wouldn't necessarily command a motorist's attention.
The two-level mid-century house, with its blue-gray wood siding and long, street-facing gallery, is striking -- but not assertively so. Amid the stately Colonials and Tudors that represent the architectural currency of Bethesda's Bradley Hills neighborhood, it appears a comfortably self-aware but soft-spoken outlier.
Halves of a bisected boulder flank a floor-to-ceiling window, helping erase the line between inside and outside.
(Timothy Bell for The Washington Post)
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You probably wouldn't guess, for instance, that it once drew onlookers by the tens of thousands. Or that the editors of Architectural Record named it one of the 20 most significant American houses of 1961.
And you'd never guess how a recent renovation, informed by a 45-year-old brief, has once again made this house something to behold.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1960, this most curious of residences briefly opened its doors to the public, born of a public relations stunt by the National Lumber Manufacturers Association. It had been designed by the Washington architectural firm of Keyes, Lethbridge and Condon, but its construction was overseen by the fraternal organization of lumbermen, named, whimsically, the International Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo. Thus did the "House of Wood," as it was called in many news accounts at the time, also come to be known as the "Hoo-Hoo House."
Over the next few months more than 20,000 visitors came through its door, drawn by newspaper stories that bandied about words such as "experimental." In truth, the house wasn't experimental so much as singularly devoted to the celebration of wood -- a brilliant maneuver on behalf of an industry battling the manufacturers of linoleum, Formica, aluminum siding, and wall-to-wall carpet for the affections of mid-century homeowners.
Throngs came out every weekend, eager to see one of the world's most plentiful and unremarkable building materials employed to kaleidoscopic effect in a house conceived as a showcase for various hardwoods. White oak, cedar, birch, redwood, Honduras mahogany, Douglas fir, and pines of Idaho white and Southern yellow were just some of the woods used for the house's floors, ceilings, walls, cabinets, shingles and sidings .
Lee Roberts, now 77, was president of the Washington Hoo-Hoo chapter at the time. He hasn't set foot inside the space since John F. Kennedy took office, but he can still hear the symphony of hammered nails, smell the sawdust, witness the small miracle of a house frame standing where only days before nothing stood at all. He recalls with pride how he personally procured the yellow pine for the living room ceiling.
"It was really exhilarating to see this thing come out of the ground," says the now-retired Roberts, from his home in Silver Spring.
After making its up-with-lumber point publicly, the Hoo-Hoo House was quietly sold, and went through only two owners in three decades until it was purchased in 1993 by Jorge Goldstein, a Buenos Aires-born patent attorney. Though vaguely aware of his home's 15 minutes of fame, he didn't know the full story until he opened a cabinet drawer during the chaos of unpacking. Inside was a collection of photographs and old news clippings about the house -- and not just from trade publications, but from The Washington Post, the New York Times and Architectural Record.
Goldstein realized that he had an architecturally significant house on his hands. And with that realization came a certain responsibility to handle any renovations with extra care.
"I very much liked the open space of the living room, and the sliding glass doors that looked out onto the garden," says Goldstein. "I've always loved Japanese minimalism, that sense of less-is-more, of uncrowded straight lines with an asymmetrical touch somewhere. This house had it."
But it also had four decades' worth of wear and tear. And though the original architecture harmonized nicely with the landscape, Goldstein wanted to obliterate boundaries between interior and exterior: to allow even more natural light into the living room and to open up the garden for viewing from within.
A few years after moving in, Goldstein learned that, coincidentally enough, a fellow Argentinian was living at the end of his cul-de-sac, in a traditional house whose façade had been updated with a subtle but unmistakably modern inflection. When he and his wife, Sandy, finally decided to renovate, they approached their neighbor and asked him who his architect was. My brother, replied the owner.
