The Edward Durell Stone House

The Edward Durell Stone House sits behind a striking white screen on East 64th Street, one of the Upper East Side's most recognizable modernist interventions. Originally an 1878 brownstone, the building was transformed in 1956 when Stone, its owner and architect, refaced the front with a perforated masonry screen — a repeating pattern of circles and squares that filters light across four stories while shielding the interior from the street. Plate glass sits behind the screen, so the geometric pattern reads almost like lace laid over glass.

Inside, Stone carried the same motif through the interiors, using sliding partitions modeled on Japanese shoji screens and echoing the filigree pattern in a luminous ceiling. It was his own residence until 1964, a rare case of a modernist architect using his own home as a manifesto — a synthesis of the formal restraint he brought to buildings like MoMA and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, compressed into a single Manhattan townhouse. The building gained landmark protection in 1981 as part of the Upper East Side Historic District, and today houses Gladstone 64, a contemporary art gallery.