Own the Home of the Man Who Designed the MOS Musical Stairs

Chris Janney’s function brings together architecture, mild, and sound, and he analyzed out some of his types on his very own Lexington residence.


Pictures by Justin and Victoria Anfuso of Anfuso Imaging

75 Kendall Road, Lexington
Selling price: $2,500,000
Dimensions: 6,348 square ft
Bedrooms: 5
Bogs: 4 entire, 1 partial

You’ve most likely encountered Christopher Janney’s do the job just before if you have been to the Museum of Science. At any time run up and down the musical stairs there, producing a cacophony of appears? That’s his perform. Janney is an MIT- and Princeton-educated architect and jazz musician who combines his two parts of expertise into his style do the job. The end result is style and design operate that brings together gentle, seem, and shade for areas that experience like art.

Janney also tests out most of his design get the job done in Lexington property, where he’s lived considering the fact that 1989. But he didn’t just restrict his exploration to pen and paper sketches carried out in his greenhouse studio. He tried using out his strategies on the house alone. In excess of the final a few many years, he’s formed the home: rebuilding the greenhouses in the back again, connecting the garage to the property, including a second story, and developing a studio and deck. With every single addition, he additional his very own contact, experimenting with curved designs and glass he incorporated into his other operate. In undertaking so, he remodeled this 1929 farmhouse into a whimsical framework that calls to head his Children’s Museum structure work.

Almost everywhere you flip here, there are surprising structure factors: Colored glass, geometric cutouts, glass partitions, and curvilinear strains make conventional home areas like the kitchen area or the dwelling space totally one particular-of-a-variety. Minor information like glass-encased rooms formed like a nautilus or round cutouts by the kitchen area cupboards incorporate a futuristic vibe to the home, while an abundance of hardwoods and windows keep the area gentle and airy.

In addition to having 5 bedrooms (together with a primary suite with custom built-ins and a circular window providing views of the 1.5 acre assets and close by conservation land), this residence also has a subterranean seem studio. Head down the spiral staircase (surrounded by crimson glass) to the soundproof house wherever Janney himself crafted tunes. There’s also two spacious greenhouses out again (4,000 square feet and 2,500 sq. toes) that are open up to even more works by using, including serving as an in-legislation apartment. Janney himself works by using them as a store/storage house and as a style and design studio the place he builds his prototypes. “I get a great idea at two in the morning, I can go out and at the very least sketch it out and acquire it. (Then I) go back again to rest, and wake up to truth. I nonetheless have a thing I can look at,” he claims. “So it’s been terrific for that.”

Janney now ideas to split his time concerning New York Town and Los Angeles, exactly where his adult kids live and do the job as a musician and a online video editor (“I like to believe the property and the residence affected their careers,” he quips). In executing so, he’ll need to have to say goodbye to his house, opening the door for an additional household who with any luck , sees the exact same chance in the home that he did. “I really do not consider the household is for all people, but I assume it’s the correct area for the proper kind of spouse and children,” he says. “It is my third youngster. I want to let it go out in the globe and be what it requirements to be.”

For additional details, call Donna Marcantonio, Petrowsky Jones Group of Compass, 75kendall.com.

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