Notes from the host
Amazing Mountain Top Home on 160 Acres
• Estate features the most spectacular views in the Mt. Monadnock region
• “Floor to ceiling” and “wall to wall” glass
• 24'x60’- 10’ deep, 70,000 gallon gunite swimming pool with large spa
• Tennis and Bocce Ball Courts
• Less than two hours from Boston and four hours from New York City
• Billiards and table tennis
• Built in the late 50's the house is on the cover of the book "Breaking Ground: Henry B. Hoover, New England Modern Architect" and featured in "Tomorrow's Houses: New England Modernism" (both books available on Amazon)
• Basement gym
• DSL-Wi-Fi
• 55” Samsung, Blue-ray, broadcast channels, internet (no dish or cable TV)
• 60" Sony in gym broadcast channels, internet
• 40" Sony, Blue-ray, Roku/internet
• DVD library
• Washer/Dryer
• Fireplace
• Grand piano
• Screen porch
• Patios, gas grill
• Well equipped kitchen with black granite counter tops and stainless appliances
• Top floor Master Suite (up the spiral stairs) has a double bath (two sinks, two toilets, tiled tub and a walk-in shower)
• Pets welcome with prior approval
Allow us welcome you to a Mid-Century Modern design masterpiece in the heart of the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. A wonderful light, airy, 6 bedroom, 6 bathroom, open concept tribute to the period. Terrazzo floors. Wool carpet in bedrooms. Granite and Douglas fir walls. And glass. So much glass. Everywhere you turn the wonders of this amazingly private piece of the natural world is invited in to your presence.
We offer you privacy, acres of hiking trails, swimming pool with 10 person spa, gym, bocce court, billiards and ping-pong tables, a tennis court and all the wonders of Mount Monadnock. Come get away from it all in this Henry Hoover designed, and now meticulously restored, mid-century treasure.
Featured in the book "Breaking Ground" by Giese and Hoover (available on Amazon.) This is how they describe the house and its origins:
"Along with other multiple commissions in Lincoln, Hoover began a house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The Shearer House (1955-57) was commissioned by William Leonard Shearer III, president of Paine Furniture Company of Boston. Shearer knew two Hoover clients in Lincoln, James DeNormandie, a former classmate at Harvard, and Charles Fitts, a company vice president, for whom Hoover had designed a house in 1948. DeNormandie’s parents lived in the Hoover house of 1947, previously discusses. Shearer and his wife, Constance, as frequent dinner guests, had admired their hosts “simple and nice” house. They wanted their own. At over 8000 square feet, it would be Hoover’s largest and most exuberant. Although Jaffrey was relatively far from Boston and Shearer’s place of work, the couple lived in the house Hoover designed for nearly fourteen years.
Shearer had hoped to build earlier, but the Korean War had prevented construction. It was not until the war’s end, having purchased a spectacular piece of New Hampshire property, that Shearer hired Hoover. A busy professional, Shearer designated his wife as the main conduit to the architect. The two worked well together. Had Shearer been more actively involved with the architect, the resulting design might have been more conservative, at least on the basis of the furniture his company manufactured.
Unlike the sites of Hoover’s houses in Lincoln, notable for their pastoral scenes of ledges, ponds, and wooded hills, the Shearer property was truly remarkable, commanding a view of 3,166-foot Mount Monadnock and 360-degree panorama of the lower mountains and fields below. Surrounded by conservation land, the previously farmed property retained its rural character. An old lane winding half a mile from the road to the crown of the hill became the driveway. Hoover oriented the house east/west on the highest point of the property to exploit proximity to the mountain.
The house appears from the entry as two stories but is actually Hoover’s only three story design, a grouping of three flat-roofed, interlocking stone sided volumes stacked at right angles to each other. Open and enclosed balconies projecting beyond the lower volume on three sides, with eaves supported by stone fin walls, give the uppermost floor the effect of a penthouse. The result is a luxurious sequence of flat forms to stage the weekend parties the Shearers enjoyed on this spectacular site.
Although this house is basically an H-plan, here the outer sections of the H are given primary emphasis. On approach to the house, the main entrance is hidden by the high granite wall of the garage until full arrival. The entrance foyer too gives no hint of (the) theatricality beyond. Only after one of Hoover’s signature right-angle turns does the spatial drama begin to unfold. A spiral staircase of Hoover’s design, encased within a granite cylinder, circling upward to the master bedroom suite, is immediately confronted. Moving forward, the landing becomes a platform (“Hall” on the plans), orchestrating passage through space. This platform effectively stages circulation into and through the principle parts of the house.
A choice is now offered: entering the dining area to the west (actually the north east) or descending three broad steps to a glazed hallway from which a stony meadow landscape can be viewed. From the hallway, the living room is initially obscured from view by a free standing storage wall of Douglas fir. Not until turning left and moving beyond the wall does the size and grandeur of this room become apparent. It extends nearly thirty-five feet beyond the dining room to the fully glazed south wall. Along the west (again, the east) wall, a prominent granite and marble fireplace defines a seating area. The sheer breadth of this generous volume, and indeed the entire main floor, is accentuated by the uniform tonality of materials and fluid gradations in light and levels. To all appearances the house is simply one great room for dining, conversing, and circulating. But in fact, to the east (actually west) on the same floor and below, are bedrooms with their own balconies or access to the terrace with swimming pool, game room between. To the north on the main level are kitchen, bedroom, utilities, and garage.
Once again, Hoover employs modularization as a design tool to enhance perception of space. Setting a module of 6-feet 6-inches at the very entrance of the house, Hoover continued to use it to inform many interior dimensions: the length of the entrance into the hall (one module), the width of the platform steps (two modules), the width of the dining area (three modules), as well as that of the living great room at the widest point from the lower platform entry to the fireplace wall opposite (four modules). It appears that even the full width of both service and bedroom wings conforms (three modules).
But perhaps the most remarkable is the house’s orientation. The great bank of windows in the living area faces south east, but the mountain lies to the north east beyond the window wall of the dining area, its landmark silhouette is not even immediately visible from the upper platform. And only after approaching the window, walking around the dining room table, or moving up from the living room area can the top of the mountain be seen. Even from the upper floor, reached from the entry platform (via the spiral staircase), the view of Mount Monadnock is fully seen when looking sideways from the bed in the master bedroom or standing before the glazed wall. Confronted with the most dramatic landscape of his career, Hoover chose to make Mount Monadnock a guest. Instead of being predictably present or easily achieved, the site must be sought. It is not delivered.
The Shearer House in fact demonstrates varied ways architecture can stage an experience of landscape. Sometimes Hoover provides enough foreground to create a perspective recession. Sometimes the foreground is eliminated so the landscape appears close, flattened against the glass, but never does he give a 360-degree panorama that would allow the full extent of what might be seen grasped. Only the balconies give unmediated views of the landscape. The cantilevered balcony wrapping the great room and dining area on two sides projects directly out to meadows and trees, and steps lead down from the terrace to the swimming pool at ground level. Landscape is observed unfiltered as well as from the long balcony on the uppermost floor framed by the fin walls.
Constance Shearer remarked, “You can’t compete with nature. The pictures outside our windows change every season.” Hoover, as always, understood that. But if he couldn’t compete, he would determine how nature was seen. Rather, he designed a house that may be described as a highly refined instrument for enjoying and considering the landscape, sympathetic and sensitive client, and unlimited resources. Of the more than one hundred residential designs spanning a half-century, the Shearer House is Hoover’s most dramatic achievement."