Bill Maris
“New rules or no rules?” asked Architectural Record in 1961, reviewing four recent projects by Paul Rudolph, then the chair of the department of architecture at Yale. The flashiest of the four was presented first: a two-story beach house under construction high on the dunes of Ponte Vedra, Florida, outside Jacksonville.
The House of Seven Levels was a shining example of “the new freedom” of Rudolph’s work, a home in which there was very little need for doors, or walls, or even furniture, thanks to built-in storage, ceiling heights and floor levels that varied to create spaces both cozy and dramatic, and cushions that could be arranged around the central conversation pit for a big old party. From the pit, guests had a picture-perfect view of the ocean framed by concrete walls deep enough to shade the glass from the sun.
An archival photograph showeing the view from the interior of house. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation)
From the beach the house looked like a series of squared-off caves, itching to be explored. At the residence, which was commissioned by lawyer and arts patron Arthur Milam in 1959, even the indoors felt like outdoors, and relaxing in the pit could feel like chilling on the beach in the shade of a giant umbrella.
More than sixty years later, the combination of openness and structure remains striking. But sometimes striking isn’t enough—not when deferred maintenance and shrinking dunes leave a building at risk of disappearing if it doesn’t get a major influx of knowledge and money. That risk increased after the Milam residence sat for sale on the real estate market for two years, with offers few and far between—including one from a buyer who planned to tear it down.
So it’s the good fortune of architectural history that Sheila Lee Davies, an Atlanta architect and the owner of the house as of 2021, couldn’t let it go. “I did not seek this house. I feel as if this house came to me,” she says. Davies and her husband, financial manager Jonathan Davies, had vacationed in Jacksonville’s barrier island beach communities for years. One day last fall, perusing Zillow, she ran across a listing for this “stunning house.” She thought, “Only some crazy architect would do something like that.” (In fact, local nautical charts identify the place as the “crazy house of rectangles.”)
Rudolph (seated) with students at Yale, where he served as chair of the School of Architecture. (Elliott Erwitt)
Davies googled it and realized it was by Paul Rudolph, an architect best known, and not universally beloved, for his 1960s Brutalist public works in concrete, including Yale’s Art and Architecture Building and Boston’s Government Services Center. The Milam house, which Rudolph always said was his favorite, represents an important turning point in the architect’s career: It was the last house of nearly 60 he would build in Florida, and one of his first buildings to use dramatic forms in concrete. It is iconic enough to have been used for the cover image on the 2002 book Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses.
Rudolph has recently been in the news because a number of his buildings have been demolished, including the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, and the Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, New York. Advocates for Rudolph’s work had been worrying that the Milam residence would meet the same fate ever since Teresa Milam, Arthur’s widow, put it on the market in 2017.
“At the time, the beach erosion was bad” as a result of Hurricane Irma, “there was an empty lot next door, and, at 6,858 square feet, it was small compared to other houses in the area,” says Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation. “We were afraid it was going to be torn down and replaced by a McMansion.”
The House of Seven Levels, as the residence was called, had ceiling heights and floor levels that varied to create spaces both cozy and dramatic. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation)
It didn’t help that the house, although it had stayed in the Milam family, would require more than a million dollars’ worth of maintenance work before prospective new owners could even think about ripping out the Spanish tile that now covers the original terrazzo floors, or stripping off the paint that coats the concrete blocks, which Rudolph specified must be the same color as the sand on the beach the house overlooks.
“When we inspected the property, just the repairs came back at $1.3 million,” Davies says. “At one point we considered letting it go. You can see it went back on Zillow [in November]. But then the agent said another potential buyer was looking at the property, and they were going to demolish everything but the seawall. I didn’t want to see a great design demolished.” Although the house had been listed at $4.2 million, Davies and her husband bought it for $3.45 million, having negotiated a price that took the repairs into account.
Davies is not going to demolish the house, but that doesn’t mean she does not want to make changes. She just completed the renovation of, and an addition to, a Neel Reid house in Atlanta’s Druid Hills neighborhood. “He was the Paul Rudolph of the turn of the 20th century,” she says. “The front of the house didn’t change at all, but the rest was entirely renovated, and I designed a glass pavilion surrounded by a pool in the back.” The core of the Milam residence, the part Rudolph designed in 1961, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but additions Rudolph made in the 1970s, as well as a palm-lined courtyard by another architect, are not.
“If it goes back to what it was originally, that would be brilliant,” Dickinson says. “The additions did make changes to the front and sides, and we would be anxious about what goes in their place.” As a Rudolph purist, he would like those additions to stand, but either way he hopes the new owners consult with a preservation expert on what to keep, what to replace, and what to let go.
"Sunken living rooms are coming back. My timing was perfect, right?”
The road ahead for Davies and the Milam house is full of potential pitfalls. Just ask serial renovators Craig Bassam and Scott Fellows, of the lifestyle company BassamFellows. They are about to start their sixth modern project, a Long Island beach house designed by Julian and Barbara Neski, after restoring Philip Johnson’s Hodgson House and the Schlumberger Administration Building, both in Connecticut, and a Crombie Taylor house in Rancho Mirage, California.
“It’s too easy to tear these things down,” Fellows says. “It’s a challenge, but the opportunity is incredible.” The couple have even checked out the Milam house from the beach, and they immediately noted the unsympathetic windows and bad paint job. “The hard stuff with these buildings is the technology that makes them function. You have to pull them apart like an old car to restore them,” Bassam adds.
“Structurally, everything is going to stay the same in the main house,” Davies says. “I want to take it back to the original form and then figure out how we want to live inside.” The sunken living room will stay, along with the original seating in the reading area. She would like to restore the terrazzo lurking under the tile and strip all the painted cement block. “Architecture is also fashion, and sunken living rooms are coming back,” she says. “My timing was perfect, right?”
Realtor Clare Berry was the listing agent when the house first went on the market in 2017, and she ultimately brought Davies to the agent representing the house in 2020. “A house like this goes in a lot of different directions in terms of interest,” she says. “Some people appreciate the architecture, some people are curious, some people appreciate the location. The ones who were most interesting and fun were people who lived in Rudolph houses not in Florida.” The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation tries to keep tabs on Rudolph houses for sale. Should you get the bug, three are listed right now, including the Tuttle residence in Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay, and the more modest Engel residence in Harrison, New York.
Other Notable Paul Rudolph Designs
THE COLONNADE: For this Singapore condominium building, completed in 1987, Rudolph experimented with the idea of replicable design units. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Estate/Paul Rudolph Heritage)
BASS RESIDENCE: Rudolph used multiple levels and cantilevers in this Fort Worth home designed for Texas power couple Sid and Anne Bass in 1970. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Estate/Paul Rudolph Heritage)
23 BEEKMAN PLACE: The architect built a cantilevered addition on top of his traditional NYC brownstone in the late ’70s; he lived there until his death, in 1997. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Estate/Paul Rudolph Heritage)
BURROUGHS WELLCOME: A pharmaceutical company’s futuristic North Carolina headquarters, completed in 1972 and demolished, despite protests, this January. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Estate/Paul Rudolph Heritage)
Berry had her own history with the house. Arthur Milam, who died in 2016, was the longtime employer of, and mentor to, her husband. When he interviewed for a job with Milam in the late 1970s, the process included an invitation for sangria at the house. “I said, ‘To heck with the sangria, I want to see the house!’ ” Berry says. Over the years the couple got to house-sit for the Milams and were invited to numerous parties, which included oceanfront tennis on the courts adjacent to the house. Davies imagines “the original house used more as an entertainment space, not so much for personal living.”
“I want to restore the main house but make it livable by today’s standards,” she says. “One of the things that is crazy to me is that none of the windows and doors on the ocean are operable.” When Rudolph designed the house, it was his first to feature air conditioning, and the design showcased the joy of artificial climate control at the expense of indoor-outdoor connections. His wide single panes of glass have long since been replaced with smaller ones, which stiffens the windows against the coast’s frequent hurricanes but also interrupts the view. Today, impact-resistant windows come in much larger sizes, so it’s possible to make them mullion-free again.
Photograph of the home soon after completion. (Courtesy Paul Rudolph Estate/Paul Rudolph Heritage)
She also questions having a solid wall, apart from a tiny pass-through, between the kitchen and the living room. “One of the articles said they had an opening so you could look out to the ocean from the kitchen, but I don’t think anybody would really enjoy that today.”
Bassam and Fellows’s advice: Take it slow. “We do the research ourselves—we have lived in the house. We get to be there, to use things to see what’s working and not. It has to be done gradually and very thoughtfully—and we didn’t have the luxury to move out,” says Bassam, who is also an architect.
While the ceilings downstairs in what Rudolph called “the fishbowl” are high, and the room is flooded with light, the upstairs bedrooms are small and low-ceilinged, as was typical of the era. Davies is considering an addition with a master suite that will be more comfortable for 21st-century life, just as the Milams had Rudolph come back to accommodate Arthur’s need for an office and the family’s desire for more generous guest quarters.
In a 1961 speech on architectural education, “Rudolph said the architect should be pushing toward ‘a renewed concern for visual delight,’ ” Davies says. “My goal is to create new visual delight, adding my own vocabulary to create a new harmony, but informed by Rudolph’s design.”