The architect Paul Rudolph was drafted at the height of World War II, leaving graduate school at Harvard for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he supervised the construction of ships. After the war, he found his way back to Cambridge, where he spent days studying under Walter Gropius, and evenings, at least some of them, in the company of a clever Navy vet named John Fullam. Fullam would run for Congress twice and become one of the longest-serving federal judges in U.S. history. But at the time, he was just a fellow raconteur with a sharp girlfriend, Alice Freiteit, who was studying psychology at Radcliffe and had plans to go into publishing in New York. The couple made Rudolph a promise: Someday, they’d hire him to design their dream house. About ten years later, Rudolph got the call. No longer a struggling striver, he had won recognition for nimble, light-filled homes of wood and glass in Florida and earned heftier commissions for brick and concrete buildings in Massachusetts.
Rudolph had just started a job as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, designing a masterpiece of brutalism and cozy warmth that would serve as the department’s classrooms and studios, but he apparently made time for the Fullams. John had a job as a lawyer in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the couple bought a 26-acre patch of land nearby. Rudolph sketched a home built around a two-story great room, whose glass façade would gaze down a hill, over the sweep of land, under a roof with a pleated “Googie” design. This was audacious in an area dotted with stony, colonial farmhouses and quaint villages of Federal and Italianate homes. And a visitor might be even more surprised by the flow, with an open dining area peering over the living room, and decks on the front and back of the house. The Fullams seemed to embrace it fully. “In their letters, there’s not a ton of questioning the design,” said Eric Wolff, a Rudolph scholar who bought the home in 2014, and ended up with the family correspondence, as well as a trove of Rudolph plans. He pored over those papers with the architect John Wolstenholme to bring the home back to Rudolph’s initial vision for the place — work that earned a commendation from the AIA and landed the home on the National Register. “It’s a completion, we like to call it,” Wolff said on the phone with me this week.
That’s because the Fullams had been on a budget, seeking ways to cut down construction costs. Poring over the letters, Wolf discovered “a lot of questioning whether they needed all the space, or could afford all that space.” They had moved in with two daughters, and felt they could skip one of the wings off the main living area, with a guest room and a family den. Rudolph agreed, and Fullam kept costs down by building some of the stone walls himself on weekends. The family eventually had two sons, and split the bedrooms up, but never considered moving out — not even in 1966, when Fullam was facing a 1.5-hour commute each way to his federal job in Philadelphia, which he would hold for the next 45 years. Asked by a local reporter whether he’d consider moving, Fullam replied, “Certainly not — not after all the work I put into building this house by myself.”
The Fullams might have met in Boston, but they were country people. John’s mother had actually grown up in a farm down the road. Alice had been raised in cities and suburbs but told a reporter she found solitude “delicious.” She baked nine loaves of bread per week, raised goats, rabbits, and chickens, and composted to fertilize her organic farm. As for domestic work, “I’d rather have the house a mess and have them doing creative things,” Alice said. One daughter’s pottery lined Rudolph’s shelves. A son could be spotted outside, throwing a baseball each morning with his father, before the long commute. “We used to play Matchbox cars on the flagstone floors,” said Sally Fullam, their eldest daughter. “Looking at the walls is like looking at the back of my hand. I know that rock, and that rock, and that rock. The things you look at for a long time you just know.”
The Fullams were proud of their house, staying until 2007, in a bedroom decorated with Rudolph’s framed sketch. But they had asked their college friend not to publicize it, and the house had remained a mystery to Rudolph scholars. The address had appeared on lists of finished projects, but Kelvin Dickinson, who runs the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, hadn’t seen a single drawing until he got a call from Wolff, the new owner. “I said, ‘Eric, I’m going to need a few hours just to walk around and take photographs,’” Dickinson remembered.
He was surprised to find a unicorn. “Rudolph is not very Rudolphian on this project,” Dickinson told me with a laugh. The home is the only Rudolph ever made in fieldstone, as far as he had found, and the design shows him at a moment of transition between two very different styles. In Florida, Rudolph had been perfecting light-filled, passive solar homes. At Yale, he started building darker, brooding structures in concrete. Like the Florida houses, the Fullam residence has a roof that hangs over the glass windows, providing shade at the height of summer. But as the winter sun dips lower, it penetrates further back — hitting the rear wall on winter solstice, per Wolff, who observed the phenomenon only after moving in. “That can’t be a coincidence,” he said. As he perfected the home over the last decade, Wolff collected Rudolph furniture and embarked on a project to make digital versions of never-completed Rudolph projects. But what was most satisfying was simply to live in No. 372. “This is one of those houses in the middle of nature, and you always feel that,” he told me. “I’ve lived there for 12 years now, and every time I see the first snow, I gasp.”
