ORIGINS

We had the pictures, and we needed a place to hang them - Lee Ault

Displaying the Ault art collection was the mainstay of the house that Noyes designed for the Ault family in 1951. As captured in a 1953 NYTimes article, it was designed such that you engaged the art even before you engaged the house itself: “The house is entered through a fenced-off patio, a roofless outdoor room, furnished with splendid examples of contemporary sculpture. Directly ahead is a glass wall. A second wall, parallel to it, is only a few feet farther on. Covered with glass cloth and hung with paintings by Picasso, Gris, Braque, Rouault, among others, the room gets day as well as night illumination, for the architect has angled a window in the roof in such a way that the pictures are flooded with natural light”. 

Placed on a lush four-acre property, the building was organized as a carefully choreographed sequence of indoor and outdoor spaces, all woven together within a single rectangular frame. A private wing of bedrooms flanked the house at one end, a service wing with a kitchen and rooms for staff at the other, and between them a spacious living area organized in three rooms that housed the Ault collection and bound the whole composition together. Integral to the design were the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, which seamlessly connected the living areas to the three outdoor spaces within the house's frame: a reflecting pool, a walled courtyard, and a garden patio. Situated at the far end of the property, in the ground, was a second structure: an oval swimming pool. 

Almost two decades later, in 1969, the owners, who had bought the property from the Ault family in 1959, commissioned Noyes to design a studio to be placed adjacent to the house. Mirroring the Ault building's design language, the studio became the third structure on the expansive property, a scaled-down version of the main house.