Rare mid-century NJ home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé listed for $1.5 million

A rare mid-century modern home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Edgar Tafel has been listed for sale in New Jersey.

Sitting on a quiet cul-de-sac a few miles from the bygone anarchist colony where Tafel grew up, 18 Crest Drive in Metuchen was a collaboration between Tafel, the original owners and renowned landscape architect and professor Karl Linn. It was custom-built in 1955 and recently listed for $1.5 million by Roberta "Bobbie" Galkin with RE/MAX Competitive Edge.

Galkin said the four-bedroom, five-bathroom home is one of Metuchen's most notable. Its original owners, World War II veteran turned contractor Theodore "Ted" Simkin and his wife, librarian Janice G. Simkin, were active community members, Galkin said. Its designers, Tafel and Linn, were near the top of their fields.

Born in New York City to Russian immigrants and raised in the pro-anarchist Ferrer Colony in Piscataway, Tafel started under Wright in 1932 at the age of 20. For nearly a decade, Tafel studied under Wright at Taliesin and Taliesin West. He worked as Wright's senior apprentice and contributed to many of his major projects, including Wingspread (1937), the Johnson Wax Building (1939) and Fallingwater (1939).

Tafel then went out on his own. He did drafting work for the U.S. Army while stationed in India during the Second World War and later opened his own practice in New York City, according to records kept by the University of Illinois, which has an endowment program named in Tafel's honor.

Before he died in 2011 at the age of 98, Tafel designed three college campuses, nearly three dozen buildings for religious organizations and 80 homes, according to his New York Times obituary. Tafel also reunited with Wright in Wright's later years and helped him secure the contractor for one of his last works, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Tafel's design at 18 Crest Drive shows meticulous attention to detail and craftsmanship, according to Galkin. Clad almost entirely in brick, the flat-roofed home has large rooms with high ceilings and a ton of windows. The views outside offer a serene landscape screened by trees and plantings and designed by Linn.

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German-born, Linn fled Nazi Germany for Palestine before traveling to Zurich for training as a psychoanalyst. Linn was a firm believer in the therapeutic power of nature. Rather than enter the medical field, however, he moved to New York to become a landscape architect, according to records kept by the University of California in Berkeley. Linn lived in Berkeley in retirement. There, he co-founded the Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative and has a garden named in his honor, Karl Linn Community Garden

Linn's early work in the States caught the attention of architect Philip Johnson, who like Tafel was a specialist in modern and postmodern design. The two collaborated on projects, including Manhattan's Seagram Building, before Linn left behind prominent partnerships and affluent clientele to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's landscape architecture program in 1959.

Linn, who would teach at the New Jersey Institute of Technology before retiring in 1986, developed a collaborative program to convert vacant urban lots in Philadelphia into student-designed community spaces. Known as the Neighborhood Renewal Corps, the early design-build program inspired similar initiatives across the United States, University of California records show.

The home Linn landscaped in Metuchen sits on more than a half acre near Metuchen High School. It features a sunroom, outdoor patios, a small, separate basketball area and decorative outdoor lighting to enjoy the surroundings.

The home was built by Simkin through his family's company, Charles Simkin and Sons Construction. A native of Perth Amboy, where he and his wife attended high school, Simkin joined the family business after his U.S. Army service during World War II. Simkin locally helped plan and build the Congregation Neve Shalom in Metuchen and served as the President of the Jewish Federation of Northern Middlesex County. He also held posts on the Metuchen Planning Board, the New Jersey State Medical Board and the Middlesex County Utilities Commission, according to his 2015 obituary in the Central New Jersey Home News Tribune.

Janice G. Simkin, meanwhile, spent nearly two decades as the librarian at Martin Luther King School in Piscataway after earning her master's degree at Rutgers University. Active at Neve Shalom as well as Beth Mordecai in Perth Amboy, she was a member of the League of Women Voters, the National Library Association and the New Jersey State Optometry Board, the Home News Tribune reported.

The pair moved to Boca Raton, Florida in the 1990s. Both died this century.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Rare mid-century NJ home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé listed for $1.5 million