For some potential buyers, it’s likely enough that this four bedroom, four bathroom home for sale near Princeton in Hopewell, New Jersey has 76 acres (including a scenic stream) and gets power from its own solar panels (enough to achieve this) net-zero in the summer months) and impresses with a striking mix of open, contemporary architecture with traditional natural materials.
But that’s just the beginning of the story – perhaps appropriate, considering the seller was long-time New York writer and bestselling author Richard Preston. The story includes classic antiquity, Frank Lloyd Wright, an abandoned factory in Duluth, Minnesota, and flying squirrels.
Freestone Farm’s main house was built on the plans of a 19th century barn that previously stood on the site.
Richard, who co-commissioned Michelle Cutler’s design with his wife in 2001, has made a career writing about outbreaks – real and fictional. His 1994 bestseller, The Hot Zone, examined the danger of the Ebola virus long before the term became popular (the book was adapted into the 1995 film Outbreak). His book Demon in the Freezer, published in 2002, documented the eradication of smallpox.
During the real-life Covid-19 pandemic, Richard’s house – with its sprawling grounds and outdoor meeting rooms – was an ideal nesting place.
The home sits on 76 acres and includes an adjoining original farmhouse that was long in the office of author Richard Preston.
Long-based on Bainbridge Island, Washington, Cutler is perhaps best known for designing Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ Seattle mega-mansion in 2005 (Masonry with Poetic Impact) – and this semi-rural house was for him a chance to get back to your roots.
A small stream and a bridge mark the entrance to the property.
While it is unmistakably a contemporary house with wide, flowing rooms and lots of natural light through the glass walls, the materials and shapes unmistakably take up the colloquial language of local farmhouses with their stone foundations and chimneys. Pitched roofs and wooden beam ceilings. In fact, Cutler was so excited about the existing structures on site – a 19th-century farmhouse.
Like the replaced bank barn, the house is partly nestled in a small slope.
“Jim looked at that and said, ‘Well, you’ve got the spirit of a barn, and I’ll try to bring that spirit to life as a house,” Richard recalls.
While the old farmhouse became Richard’s office (he wrote five books from there), a long, vertical extension became the main house on the plan of the old stone barn. Cutler notes that its long, rectangular shape was not dissimilar to that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff estate near Buffalo, New York.
The spacious interior is divided into a series of bay windows in the rhythm of the original barn.
In the Preston Residence, known as Freestone Farm, the rooms are divided into a simple grid modeled after the original bays of the barn. For example, each of her three children’s rooms occupies a single bay window, while the master bathroom has two bay windows. The living and dining room with two bay windows and one bay window are located on the ground floor, while the kitchen and the family room occupy another three bay windows.
That rhythm of the bays repeats itself outside the home, what Richard describes as some sort of architectural folly: a series of stone pillars that take inspiration not only from the barn itself, but also from Wright’s original Taliesin Wisconsin home and studio – especially the one Stone pillars of a now dismantled shed in Taliesen’s Midway Barn. “Jim said he basically built the spirit of Taliesin into the spirit of the barn we had,” says Richard.
The stone pillars on the edge of the Preston’s outside porch are inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in Wisconsin.
For the Prestons’ Freestone Farm House, Cutler added a subtle touch that wasn’t Taliesin. It’s a nod to classical Greco-Roman architecture: a subtle convex curve. “The entire masonry has a bulge,” explains the author. “There is a kind of swelling. The technical term for this is entasis. You see it in Greco-Doric columns. It gives the stone a muscular strength and a quality of liveliness, as if it were alive and muscular, and it holds the structure”.
That’s not the only classic inspiration at Freestone Farm. What you and I might call the outside fireplace Cutler and Richard affectionately call Megaron.
The outdoor fireplace was inspired by Richard Preston’s reading of Homer.
Just before the house was designed, Richard had read The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were actually oral stories before they became hallmarks of ancient Greek literature.
“The person we now call Homer actually spoke The Odyssey,” explains Richard. “The poet came into the home of a royal or noble family and there was a room with a fireplace in the middle called the megaron. The poet stood by the fire with a lyre and sang the lines. So I said to Jim, ‘I think of this fireplace as a megaron where we tell each other stories and sit by the fire at night.’ “
During the pandemic, that is exactly what happened when Richard’s adult children came to visit. “We all got together as a family and decided to eat outside for safety reasons,” recalls the author. “We made a big fire in the megaron and we sat around the fire and told stories.”
The open kitchen sits under massive Douglas fir ceiling beams.
Freestone Farm is not only linked to Bill Gates’ residence through Cutler’s designs. The ceiling beams are made of old Douglas fir that was obtained for the Gates project.
“These Douglas firs were cut sometime around 1900 and they were used to build a factory building in Duluth, Minnesota. Neither Jim nor Bill Gates wanted to cut fresh wood for these very large beams, so they looked around and found this abandoned building in Duluth that bought Gates, “explains Richard.” There was a lot more wood that was actually used for the Gates- Residence was needed, so we piggybacked Bill Gates and got all of those woods. “
The master suite has its own fireplace and built-in window sills with sweeping views over the treetops.
The Prestons are already looking forward to their next home in Maine, but leaving Freestone Farm is bittersweet. “We were all in tears,” says Richard. In addition to the house itself, the family on the property indulges Richard’s secret passion: climbing trees and even camping in their branches in hammocks – and a few unexpected friends who come with the sale.
Large windows allow natural light throughout the house.
“It turns out that the treetops in New Jersey are full of flying squirrels, but you never see them unless you climb the trees,” explains the author. “They are very gentle creatures and surprisingly tame. You can stroke their heads and they close their eyes like a cat. Some of them landed on our son Oliver one morning. He had eaten potato chips, and it … It turns out that flying squirrels are like potato chips. He was lying in his hammock and sitting up – and on his head was a flying squirrel. “
318 Hopewell Amwell Road in Hopewell, New Jersey is being offered for $ 3,500,000 by Joan Loraine Otis of Callaway Henderson Sotheby’s International Realty.
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