By Nancy Keates
Joel Disend and Shen-Hsin Hung were living in Manhattan when they decided to buy a weekend getaway about an hour's drive from the city. Disend, 83, had retired as chairman and chief executive of a leading financial consulting company but Hung, 59, was still working and wanted to keep a foot in the city.
Disend searched the tri-state area for four years when he finally discovered the Celanese House in New Canaan, the suburban Connecticut town where Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House is located. Designed by Edward Durell Stone in 1959, the Midcentury Modern home is one of more than 80 built in the area.
"It was intriguing," Disend says, but the couple didn't like how the interior had been redone by a past owner, who had plopped the kitchen where there had originally been a central interior courtyard. "The aesthetic wasn't great," he says.
Despite the design quirks, the couple purchased the home in 2008 for $4.1 million and set out on a two-year renovation that cost $2 million.
A full-scale renovation
Disend and Hung put in a new kitchen with new cabinets and appliances, and added another skylight. They also added a new main bedroom, redid the main bathroom with marble radiant heated tile floors and installed more glass windows in the entryway.
Throughout the house, the couple put in new oak floors and lifted the sheet rock walls to create a floating effect. They transformed the fireplaces from wood-burning to glass, and changed the surrounds from brick to marble.
Can't-miss features
The home has a distinctive lattice-screen facade, pyramid-shaped skylights and walls of glass.
Other distinctive touches include a glass floor over what used to be a water feature in the entryway, a floating staircase that connects the house to the yard, and a Boffi pipe shower faucet in the main bathroom.
Reason for selling?
After having spent mostly weekends at the house, Descend and Hung lived there for six months during the pandemic. In 2023, they returned to spending close to half their time at their apartment in Chelsea. Their desire to travel more combined with the hassle of having to maintain two homes led them to put the home on the market.
"Having to worry about two places isn't great," says Hung.
Market snapshot
Inger Stringfellow, an agent with William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty who has the listing, says the market segment for Midcentury Modern homes is small, but the buyers tend to be passionate.
The median sales price for single family homes in New Canaan was $2.55 million as of the end of October, up from $2.29 million compared with a year earlier.
Write to Nancy Keates at Nancy.Keates@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 12, 2025 12:32 ET (17:32 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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