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Stage Suburban Psychodramas in this $9M Midcentury Modern

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Location: Rye, N.Y.
Price: $9,250,000
The Skinny: The sturdy, solid exterior lines and soaring, yet strangely contained, interior spaces of this midcentury modern home on gated Manursing Island speak to its heyday in the New York suburbs of the early 1960s. It's lovely as a museum display of Eames furniture and post and beam architecture, with its suspended staircase and walkway and its floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Long Island Sound. As an expression of the headspace of the time and place in which it was built, though, it recalls tightly wound Cheever protagonists glumly drinking gin by the pool, ogling each other's spouses and dreading the train ride back to the city on Monday morning. Maybe it's just the current decor: a piano prominently displayed in the formal living, wooden ships and hunting trophies tacked to the walls, the telescope with which to watch the yachts plying the Sound—it's all stultifyingly safe and predictable, modern with quotation marks, a real missed opportunity. It's asking $9.25M.

· 54 Island Drive, Rye, N.Y. [Sotheby's International]
· All House of the Day posts [Curbed National]