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BRUCE CAPRA enjoys fixing up old houses.
Wendy Carlson for The New York Times Most of the furnishings are antiques.
So when a real estate agent in New Canaan told him about an important house that was likely to be torn down, he decided to go take a look. " My estimator said it is 1850's," kata Mr. Capra, who was expecting a colonial. Instead, he drove up to a bold example of 1950s architecture: a sprawling, single-story building with 12 large pyramidal skylights poking through its roof. The entire house is wrapped in hundreds of crisscrossed wooden slats. The unusual building, Mr. Capra learned, was designed by Edward Durell Stone , whose best-known works, which include the Kennedy Center in Washington and the General Motors Building in , are notable for their repetitive geometry. In 1959, the striking house was featured on the cover of House & Garden. Mr. Capra, 62, who was pension from insurance 12 years ago, began reading up on Stone's career. Soon, he said, he felt "a passion" for the house, which had already been on the market for more than a year. Some buyers had considered tearing it down and replacing it with a much larger building. Eventually, Mr. Capra and his wife, Jackie, decided last year that they would buy the house. "I called my accountant, and I said, 'I know this sounds foolish, but this is what I'd like to do,' " Mr. Capra said. "We went over the numbers together." He offered $1.17 million for the house and promised the seller — the daughter of the couple who had lived in it since 1959 — that he would restore it. The offer was accepted. Since closing last October, Mr. Capra has made nearly a full-time job of supervising the house's rehabilitation. "I don't wear the white shirts with the cuff links anymore,” said Mr. Capra (though he did put on those items when he was photographed). Most days, he wears a pair of khakis and a V-neck sweater to his office, a small bedroom behind the kitchen in the Stone house. It's not clear if he will ever occupy more than that one room. Mr. Capra suffers from Polycythemia vera, a bone marrow disorder. "It might be that for us, now, small is better,” Mr. Capra said. Small, in the case of the Capras, is 2,200 square feet, the size of the 1950s ranch house in New Canaan where they have lived since early 2006. Before moving in, they spent more than a year turning the house into an intriguing mix of modern and traditional design. The garden has a couple of highly unusual elements, including an outdoor fireplace, designed by Mr. Capra, with an obelisk-shaped chimney. Nearby is a yellow rectangle, about 12 feet high and 20 feet wide, designed by Mr. Capra as “a whimsical way of framing the view of the woods,” he said. Inside, most of the furnishings are antiques, including a grandfather clock and a library table that the couple bought in Scotland in 1969 when they were newlyweds. But some of the artworks are startlingly contemporary. One piece, by Chris Radtke, consists of a wooden frame covered in spandex. Over time, the cloth has drooped, creating wrinkles at the bottom, in what the couple see as a meditation on aging. A stairway to the basement, designed by Mr. Capra, is made of sheets of amber-colored resin. Supported at the edges and lighted from underneath, the resin surfaces seem almost liquid. At the bottom of the stairs is a small room, with its own ventilation system, where Mr. Capra occasionally smokes cigars with friends. For years, the couple lived on the Upper East Side, and Mr. Capra commuted to the Continental Insurance offices in the financial district. In 1995, the company was sold to CNA, based in Chicago, and Mr. Capra couldn't find a job that suited him, he said. At 50, he found himself retired. So the couple pursued Mrs. Capra's lifelong dream of owning an antiques store. Following a friend's recommendation, they opened Capra Capra Antiques in Savannah, Ga., a city where they knew almost no one. They restored a 10,000-square-foot house, where they literally lived above the store. But when Mr. Capra's illness struck, he found himself flying to New York at least once a week for treatments. Eventually, the time came to move closer to his doctors, and to family. (One of the couple's two daughters had moved to New Canaan in 2004.) Downsizing from 10,000 square feet to 2,200 required the couple to sell many antiques and to move others into storage. “We have a lot of paintings of dukes and duchesses stacked up,” Mr. Capra said. Still, he said, they found room in their house “for all the things we really like.”
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