We will come to the groundhog soon, I promise.
The first thing you notice, approaching the Ault House, is that you do not arrive at it so much as into it. The house comes into view gradually, set back from the road, less a building confronting you than a clearing that opens to receive you. This quality of openness, of space organized around welcome rather than enclosure, is the house’s deepest signature. It was left there deliberately, 70 years ago, by the man who designed it.
Look, I’m really no architectural historian. But I know that Eliot Noyes completed this residence for Lee Ault—the collector, dealer, and former Art in America publisher—in New Canaan in 1952. It sits minutes away from his own home. Noyes was one of what came to be called the Harvard Five: the group of Gropius-trained modernists who settled in New Canaan in those postwar years and built, among the old colonial houses and the clapboard churches, a series of structures that still stand among the purest achievements of human‑scale modernist architecture in America. Philip Johnson’s Glass House is the most famous. Noyes’s homes are the most livable.
For me—I have spent some very happy times there with its current custodians, the Madsbjerg family, and with my wife, Sophia—what distinguishes the house is its treatment of the boundary between inside and outside, or rather, its refusal of that boundary as a categorical fact. The long, low horizontals, the flat roof, and the capacious and beautiful, pale wooden floors seem to grow from the ground rather than rest upon it. The endless glass opens the domestic world onto the Connecticut woodland.
None of this is ostentatious. The house doesn’t announce itself. What it does, quietly and with great consistency, is extend the human into the natural and draw the natural into the human. To sit in the main living space, as I have done in both the heat of midsummer and the cold of midwinter, is to dwell in a room that is also, inseparably, the outside light pouring in through the glass. The light shifts continuously and calmly as the morning moves into afternoon and evening. There is a porosity of inside and outside—a continuous conversation that no wall quite resolves.
This brings me back to the groundhog. When I stayed at the house with my wife a couple of summers back, Saadia and Christian warned me about a persistent “groundhog problem.” I glimpsed the beasts scuttling across the lawns in the morning and evening. I discovered that a few intrepid ones were attempting to burrow underneath the walls of the house, presumably with the intention of surfacing in the middle of the dining room. I grew rather fond of these furry architects and spent a lot of time pondering their subterranean existence. They were part of the house’s ambience, together with the frogs and crickets that formed a chorus for us on summer evenings as we lounged by the little lozenge‑shaped pool.
In the chapter of Being and Time that concerns space, Martin Heidegger makes the point that the German words for space and spatiality—Raum and Räumlichkeit—are etymologically linked to the ideas of “room” and “roomliness.” Space, in other words, is not primarily the infinite, homogeneous, mathematized void that Descartes and Newton bequeathed to modernity. It is the room I am in, with its temperature and light, its aspect, the direction in which its windows and doors open.
Space, for Heidegger, is always organized around dwelling. It is measured not in yards or meters, but in what he calls estimation—a stone’s throw, a plume of pipe smoke away, the distance a voice carries, the length of the tunnel down which a groundhog quietly scurries. The house has a sunny side and a shady side. The sun tracks across it through the morning and leaves it behind in the afternoon. These are not incidental features; they are the spatial character of the place, as fundamental as its materials.
Nothing about the Noyes house is abstract. When you are in it, you are not—as the Cartesian picture would have it—a thinking subject enclosed in a body confronting an extended world. You are, as Heidegger puts it, already out there, the world all around you. To dwell is not to be “in here,” enclosed within my skull and skin, but “out there” with you, in the shared space of the room we inhabit.
The fieldstone, the glass, the wood—these materials do not separate you from the land; they mediate your belonging to it. The house enacts Heidegger’s point not by argument but through experience, the only honest way to enact it. It is also a terrific place to be during a storm or a long rain shower.
In a late essay on art and space, Heidegger writes that space, thought existentially, is a clearing‑away, a Räumen. “Clearing‑away brings forth the free,” he writes, “the openness for man’s settling and dwelling.” This is not the kind of clearing typical of the minimalist or the declutterer. It is something older and more fundamental: the opening of a space in which human life can genuinely unfold, in which things can show up as themselves rather than as data points or objects of theory.
The great modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, writing under his heteronym Alberto Caeiro (a shepherd‑philosopher living on a hillside, and a poet of enormous simplicity and wry humor), arrived at the same thought from a different direction: “What matters is to know how to see, / To know how to see without thinking, / To know how to see when seeing / And not think when seeing.” But this, Caeiro goes on, “requires deep study, / Lessons in unlearning.”
Good architecture, the Noyes house suggests, is precisely such a lesson. It does not impose a theory of space upon you; it allows space—and the world beyond its walls—to reveal itself. The trees are just trees. The light is just light. The stone is just stone. The wood is just wood. Our friend, the groundhog, is just a groundhog. These plain facts, encountered in a building that has been cleared to receive them, turn out to be inexhaustible.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Long Before Nathan Fielder’s Brand of Post-Truth, There Was Janet Malcolm
How the Elite’s Cryopreservation Obsession Is Changing the Architecture of Death
11 Gallery Shows by Living Legends on View This Month in New York
What Does Hollywood’s Recent Obsession With Monster Sex Say About Our Desires?
Every Fall/Winter 2026 Fashion Collection, Collab, and Campaign You Need to Know
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
