Home Buying

There’s a mid-century modern cottage colony for sale on Cape Cod

The asking price on these eight Wellfleet homes? $5 million.

. Lukas Scott/Nauset Media

July 15, 2024

Abandoning your 9-to-5 to run a bed & breakfast in a charming vacation destination is often the stuff of daydreams. But what if instead of a bed & breakfast, you managed a colony of art-forward mid-century modern cottages on Cape Cod?

That dream could become a reality if you have $5 million or so to spare. The Wellfleet Colony hit the market this summer — it’s a grouping of eight little houses set amid nearly 4 acres of pitch pines. They’ve been the backdrop for summertime memory-making for more than 70 years.

Ranging in size from 600 to 750 square feet, the circa-1949 cottages were designed by architects Oliver Morton and Nathaniel Saltonstall, a founder of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

“Saltonstall and Morton were an interesting firm, as they were doing a kind of upscale New England modernism for mostly wealthy clients at a time when it was still viewed with great suspicion, especially in the provincial Boston area,” explained Peter McMahon, the executive director of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust.

Saltonstall worked on other modernist homes on the Outer Cape, but the Colony was a one-of-a-kind progressive design. It originally had 11 cottages across 10 acres, as well as a kitchen, office, laundry building, and storage shed; they all centered on a large art gallery. The cottages are positioned so they maximize the rays of the sun, while privacy walls decked out in geometric reliefs shield the outdoor patios from other guests.

“The idea of making garden apartments with art integrated into the site —clustered around an art gallery — was very unusual,” McMahon explained. “The relief sculptures and frescos embedded art into the architecture as well. It sometimes seems more like a West Coast concept.”

The property lies directly next to Chequessett Yacht & Country Club, and in the Colony’s early days, guests received maid service. Over the years, the place has played host to prominent art buyers, writers, artists, and Hollywood stars like Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Faye Dunaway.

Now the Colony is for sale for the first time since 1963, when a Boston artist and designer named Loris Stefani bought the complex from Saltonstall. Many of the homes still feature mid-century modern furniture, and their floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the forested setting. (In some of them, you can glimpse Cape Cod Bay through the trees.)

The colony offers 15 bedrooms and 13 full baths in total.

Think you’ve got the art and design eye for such a historical spot? Eva Scott and Daphne Lowe with Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty have the listing.