On The Market: North Ocean Way 1938 Art Moderne-style home sensitively renovated, expanded

Sometimes a historically significant home also turns out to be a great place to raise a family.

 

Such was the case with the 1938 Art Moderne-style residence that Niki Lawton moved into on the North End of Palm Beach 20 years ago when she was married to Zach Shipley.

 

Landmarked by the town, the home at 1498 N. Ocean Way was designed and built by noted architect Murray Hoffman as his private residence. But it was the land, the location, the size of rooms, the family-friendly layout and the quality of the construction that really captured Lawton’s eye while house hunting.

 

“This house was a good candidate, because it could accommodate our three children and family and friends who came to visit,” Lawton explains. “It had a big yard and so much space, so we could easily add on to it.”

 

And that’s what they did. Thanks to the size of the corner lot — 20,700 square feet — there was plenty of room to install a swimming pool and double the home’s interior space to include a new center-island kitchen equipped with professional-grade appliances, a breakfast area, a family room and a two-car garage with a room above it. In all, the house has six bedrooms, five bathrooms and 8,216 square feet of living space, inside and out.

 

“The layout of the house was absolutely ideal for us,” Lawton explains. “The back staircase leads to the family quarters, and the guest bedroom is off the foyer. There’s also a staff bedroom and a bathroom that we used as a laundry and playroom.”

 

When the family moved into the house, daughters Alexandra, Victoria and Genevieve Shipley ranged in age from 6 months to 6 years, so the quiet street, right across from what Lawton describes as the best beach in town, was a plus.

 

“I didn’t have to worry about the children running across a busy street to the beach, “ she says.

 

Today, however, the children are grown, Lawton plans to move to a home she built in coastal Maine and her ex-husband has already moved elsewhere in town. Accordingly, the house has been offered for sale by Corcoran Group Real Estate’s Palm Beach brokerage for $3.95 million.

 

The house has a variety of Art Moderne-style elements, including its curved front façade, a flat roof and grooves in the siding that help give the architecture an overall horizontal feeling. Other features include a tapering stucco chimney, an “eyebrow” projecting over the chevron-patterned front door and glass-block and wraparound-corner windows.

 

Inside, the home has its original curved staircase and two fireplaces with their rectilinear-design mantels intact.

 

The house represents a relatively small number of Art Moderne and Art Deco residences built on the island during the 1930s. Architect Hoffman was the younger brother of another architect, F. Burrell Hoffman, whose most famous South Florida residence was Vizcaya, the Miami mansion he designed for James Deering.

 

According to a Palm Beach Landmarks Preservation Commission report, Murray Hoffman graduated from the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris in 1914 and Columbia School of Architecture in 1917, and later earned another degree from Harvard in 1932. The architect, who died in New York City in 1982, was also an artist, and his work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 

When it came time to expand and remodel their house, Lawton and Shipley turned to Smith Architectural Group of Palm Beach and asked for an addition that would complement the original lines of the house. Complementing the original dining room nearby, the new family room, for example, has similar stylized columns framing the doors leading to the loggia that runs the length of both rooms.

 

“It’s pretty hard to tell old from new,” she says.

 

For more information about 1498 N. Ocean Way, call listing agents Jim McCann at (561) 296-8720 or Burt Minkoff at (561) 512-8978.