One of the most beguiling challenges in architecture is how to make minimalism look effortless. The late Hugh Newell Jacobsen was preoccupied with a variation on this challenge: how to bring the classic American farmhouse into the minimalist fold. What became known as “Monopoly houses” have a surreal perfection that can only be obtained through laborious attention to detail. In the firm’s latest monograph, American Modern Home (Rizzoli, 2022), Paul Goldberger writes: “[They were] one part abstract, minimalist sculpture, and one part celebration of the symbolic meaning of the traditional house.”
Hugh got the name recognition as a “famed Modernist architect” with a celebrity clientele, per his 2021 obituary in the New York Times. But for the last thirty years, his partner in crime was his son, Simon Jacobsen. And for most of that time, they were co-equal partners in Jacobsen Architecture.
“Here’s the thing—we’re both trying to solve the same problem, working together to continually refine the design of the buildings, the furniture, the lighting. Everything is minimized so there’s no extra little bits. That’s very difficult. But that is the art form of our firm,” says Simon, who speaks with enthusiasm about their shared obsession. To him, the work has felt like one long continuous project. “We would carry on the thing that we didn’t get quite right in the last project—or the last five projects—into the new project,” he says.
Jacobsen Architecture, Delaplane, Virginia
According to Simon, he and his father had something else in common: They both had to grapple with dyslexia and ADHD. “[Our neurodiversity] helped us be very creative in coming up with alternative ideas left and right, and we were always working around our problems. We made relationships and got through the side doors,” he says.
Among parent-child collaborations in architecture, the Jacobsens’ working relationship appears to be particularly harmonious. Starting at age 13, Simon started helping out at his father’s office in Washington D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood. He joined the firm in 1994 after studying architecture at the University of Illinois Chicago. In 2007, Hugh suggested that they start a new firm together, Jacobsen Architecture. By that point, says Simon, projects that he had done the lion’s share of work on were gaining recognition, showing that he had mastered his father’s aesthetic. “I was following his formula and winning awards,” he says. Since his father’s death in 2021, Simon has continued to run the firm, with a remote staff of four, out of a farmhouse in rural Virginia.
“I’ve got a long way to go in this business,” says Simon, who is 60 this year. “I don’t know what’s next. But you’ll still be able to tell it’s a Jacobsen building.”
Some of the signature elements of a Jacobsen building: gable roofs, traditional siding, structures that appear to be at grade; clean, modern interiors. But of course, perfection lies in the details. The gable roofs are always at a precise 45-degree angle. The siding is a rainscreen that is crisply detailed with corner boards and aggressively waterproofed in lieu of gutters and downspouts. The siding also covers the tops of the foundation walls, so that there is no distracting transition between the house and the ground plane. “We build to 1⁄16 of an inch, that’s in our contract,” says Simon.
Likewise, interiors are designed to be elegant blank canvases to showcase the homeowners’ prized possessions and furnishings. Large glass openings and volumetric spaces create a prism effect of bouncing light and shadows.
Houses of Many Gables
Among the early projects that defined the firm’s mission was the McKinney Residence in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was completed in 1994, and Simon had recently joined the firm. “Here he is basically starting what I’m going to finish 30 years later,” says Simon. “This house radicalized me.”
The house has a repeating pattern of distinctive pitched roofs, pocketing glass doors, and transparent glass railings, which were unusual in residential architecture at the time. It also had other innovative details: Hugh had figured out how to ventilate the roof by adding a continuous 1-inch-wide slot along the length of the roofline, which was barely perceptible but met the building code and eliminated the need for an overhang.
Nearly a decade later, in 2002, the Fletcher Residence in Nashville, Tennessee, would lean into the iconic gabled form by repeating it seven times—as if seven small houses were all huddled together in a pack. The historic references are clear, but it’s an artistic interpretation of the forms and elements, including the windows on the façade, which are unusually small and surprisingly placed. The cleverness of the home is fully revealed in the floor plan: all the spaces are neatly organized into seven volumes, which are arrayed in three tiers to create a classically symmetric floor plan. (One of the seven “houses” is actually a garage, a way to completely conceal car storage within vernacular architecture.) A main corridor runs through the center so that “it’s not like a rabbit warren as you’re walking through the house,” notes Simon.
A big part of the Fletcher Residence’s charm is that not only is the house distilled to its essence, but so is the surrounding landscape. The house progresses up a gentle slope, surrounded by neat lawn—a white volume on a green plane.
“A lot of people make a mistake by planting around the foundation of a building, I think,” says Simon. “We’ve gone through all this blood and sweat and treasure to make this thing as pure as possible, so it should touch the ground beautifully. And if we put a bunch of bushes there, that’s just silly.”
Integrating New and Old
When confronted with the genuine article, the firm figured out how to incorporate it. Bray House was the oldest house in Maine, dating back to 1663, located in the seaside village of Kittery Point. (During the design of this project, which was completed in 2018, Hugh was very ill.) While the two-story, 1,800-square-foot home wasn’t on the historic register, Simon presented a plan to the new owners where the original house would be retained as the centerpiece of a new home. To supplement it, he designed 7,000 square feet of gabled additions, creating a courtyard home around a pool and terrace. The collection of peaked rooftops mimics the organic way the homes of yesteryear expanded, adding more buildings as needs required.
The new additions pay homage to the past with their clapboard siding and tall casement windows. Instead of “borrowing” the windows from the original house, which Simon didn’t think were very interesting, he went around the neighborhood and found ones that he liked better in the local church, which were distinguished by enormous frames that cast deep shadows. “That’s what this art form is,” he says. “We’re pushing and pulling within these sacred shapes.”
To ensure that the original house retained its prominence, the architect was careful to keep the additions at a lower height. “We could not, in all righteousness, overshadow the old house,” says Simon. “I was so worried about being arrogant and slamming into it and ruining its proportions.” The original house, which now contains the guest bedrooms, is connected to the new buildings on either side by glass-enclosed walkways, creating a distinctive transition and offering a sweeping view of the ocean. To distinguish new from old, the additions also have 3-inch-wide clapboard instead of Bray House’s 7-inch-wide clapboard, and standing-seam metal roofs instead of a wood-shingle roof.
Bray House itself got a complete retrofit, inside and out. “The old house had to be restructured as it was about to fall down,” recalls Simon. “We tried to get as close as possible to materials and methods of 1663—we used wooden pins and dovetail connections in the ax-cut chamfered beams. We didn’t want to disturb the truly ancient interior plaster finishes and millwork, so to accomplish this surgery, all the new ducting and wiring was installed from the outside. My main responsibility to the old house was to ensure that nobody would try to tear it down or think of it as too unrefined.”
The black chimney caps are a wink to the original owner, John Bray, who was a supporter of the British during the American Revolution; Loyalists would paint a black stripe on their chimneys to let the British know not to bombard their houses.
The Latest Refinements
About to break ground is a 5,500-square-foot house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. To Simon, it represents the apotheosis—or about as close as he can get—of the classic white house that he has worked on over the past decades. It is a further abstraction of the Fletcher Residence in Tennessee, with a façade that is nearly windowless. The sharply defined forms appear to be made of board-formed concrete (but are actually clad in vertical cedar siding), with no overhangs. “The surprise is in the back, where it is all glass and the main great room ceiling rises to 23 feet, offering vast views of the pool and orchard arranged in straight alleys,” notes Simon.
When asked about the future, Simon says it will depend a lot on what clients are looking for, but that he will continue the firm’s approach of making a house more interesting by dividing it up into smaller volumes. “We want to have turns, and shadow lines,” he says.
One of Simon’s children is currently a freshman in architecture school, so chances are good that there will be another generation of architects in the family. “He is far more drawn to architecture and design at 18 than I was at 26,” notes Simon. “I would love to have him in the firm, but it’s not up to me.”
