Alison Gingeras purchased a rare Andrew Geller house at 55 Knollwood Lane valuing rarity, condition, and delight and choosing the North Fork for family and schooling. Andrew Geller designed whimsical midcentury homes in the 1960s using raw wood and glass alongside playful, unconventional forms. Shirley Geller gave many houses memorable nicknames, such as the Grasshopper House and the Milk Carton house. Alastair Gordon revived interest in Geller after a 1987 exhibition and toured Long Island to rediscover the houses. The homes emphasized warmth, self-expression, joy, and affordability for middle-class New Yorkers.
The curator Alison Gingeras bought the house at 55 Knollwood Lane for the same reasons she might buy a work of art: rarity, condition, and sheer delight. She had learned about the architect Andrew Geller in her studies of 20th-century art history, and his name stuck out as she was scrolling the internet absentmindedly in the summer of 2020. The future felt uncertain.
Through the 1960s, Geller worked in the familiar modernist palette of raw wood and glass, but he had a reputation for whimsical, almost goofy homes that earned silly nicknames from his wife, Shirley Geller. She "had a kind of knack for naming," remembered her grandson, Jake Gorst, who wrote a book on his grandfather's work. There was the so-called Grasshopper House, with its jutting leggy wings;
The houses were warmer than sleek modernist boxes, "little dream houses that inspired self-expression and personal freedom," per the critic Alastair Gordon, who revived interest in Geller after including him in a 1987 exhibition. Gordon and Geller then drove around Long Island rediscovering all of his creations. "They were so fresh, so alive, so joyous and fun and inexpensive," Gordon said on the phone this week.
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