Low-slung seating runs the length of the family room beneath a row of framed photographs. The vertical board walls are original to the 1957 house. The four-sided floating fireplace is the architectural and emotional heart of the home. Its steel frame doubles as a room divider. | PHOTOGRAPHS BY LARA KIMMERER

A Careful Renovation Respects the Modern Vision behind a 1957 Swampscott Home

A careful renovation respects the modern vision behind a 1957 Swampscott home.

Jennifer SperrySeptember 29, 2026

California may be the popular face of American midcentury modernism, but New England developed an important modernist movement of its own, fueled in part by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Walter Gropius arrived at Harvard in the 1930s after founding the Bauhaus in Germany, bringing European modernist ideas to a generation of American architects. Among those who came through Harvard was Martin Bloom (1927–2017), a Massachusetts-born architect and urban designer who grew up in Malden. He studied during an especially influential period for American modernism and later cited Gropius and Josep Lluís Sert among his influences. The wal

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A Careful Renovation Respects the Modern Vision behind a 1957 Swampscott Home

A careful renovation respects the modern vision behind a 1957 Swampscott home.

Keep Reading — It's Free to Join