Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus, was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He designed Gropius House as his family home when he came to teach architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Modest in scale, the house was revolutionary in impact. In 2000 Gropius House was named a National Historic Landmark.

In 1937, when Gropius arrived at Harvard to teach, his family rented a home in nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts. While enchanted with Lincoln and eager to build a house of their own there, it was financially untenable until Helen Osborne Storrow, the wealthy and civic minded widow of prominent Boston banker James Storrow, offered to provide the site and pay for the construction of their house.

Gropius House sits at the crest of a gentle hill that slopes up from Baker Bridge Road behind a low fieldstone wall set back one hundred feet from the road. The house occupies the middle of its 5.51-acre site. The planned landscape immediately around the house transitions gradually to the preserved natural and agricultural landscapes of the property and its surroundings. To the southeast are views of a wetland and directly to the rear of the house are woods. To the west distant views of Wachusett Mountain and Mount Monadnock are now obscured by trees but were a feature of the landscape when the house was originally built. Gropius resided here until his death.

Gropius House combines traditional elements of New England architecture—wood, brick, and fieldstone—with innovative materials including glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology in fixtures. It features furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and fabricated in Bauhaus workshops. With the family’s possessions still in place, Gropius House has a sense of immediacy and intimacy. In honor of the Bauhaus centennial in 2019, Historic New England launched a Gropius House app featuring photos, videos, and other archival materials related to the family and its social circle.

Ise Frank Gropius, continued to live in the house until shortly before her death in 1983, having deeded the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), now Historic New England, in 1980.