A Brighton home ahead of its time

It was a house arguably ahead of its time that was available at the perfect time for a couple who were not really in the market for a new home.

But a walk through the front door of this Brighton ranch during an open house was all it took for Steven Plouffe and Michael Linsner to buy the futuresque, funky, functional and colorful — with its distinctive royal purple panels, yellow front door and turquoise-blue window grilles — Alcoa Care-free Home.

“I’ve always known about the house, but had never seen it,” said Linsner, 50, a Geneseo native and software engineer for a Syracuse-based company. “I was excited to come see it, but I didn’t know I was going to buy it.”

Upon entering the 1957 home, which sits in a fairly large yard at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Clover Street, they saw a smartly laid out living room and kitchen and outdoor covered patio just beyond a large window. A subsequent tour through the rest of the three-bedroom home only delayed the inevitable.

Plouffe and Linsner had to have it right then, right there, right now — this in spite of the eight years they had spent renovating their home in Corn Hill.

“It was time to relax, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t,” said Plouffe, 45, a Webster native and software developer who works up the road from their home of three years. “We had no intention of moving. Michael said it was the biggest impulse buy of his life.”

The home was listed recently on the National Register of Historic Places, “to the delight of many of us,” said Cynthia Howk, architectural research coordinator for the Landmark Society of Western New York.

The fan of this distinctive home in her is thrilled. “I’ve been looking at this house since I was a child,” Howk said. “It was the house with the purple panels.”

But the professional, objective side of her also is excited by the national recognition.

The home was designed by Washington, D.C., architect Charles Goodman, and is one of only 24 demonstration homes developed by the Pittsburgh-based Alcoa aluminum company.

The Brighton home is the only one of its kind in New York.

A sales brochure, a neat little piece of marketing history that came with the house — and illustrates remarkably, how little the home has changed in 50 years — attempts to lure the prospective homeowner in: “Here is your dream house made real,” “... where lighter, brighter living is a promise fulfilled in every square foot,” and the most promising pitch of all, “remarkably free of the burdens of household chores and upkeep ... it combines harmoniously with wood, plastics, and fabrics to launch a new era of easy living amid heart-warming beauty.”

Let’s leave it to Plouffe and Linsner to refute and/or support the points as they may, but the sales pitch was really an ingenious way to deal with a surplus of aluminum.

Production of the metal had to be cranked up for the World War II effort, but then the war ended and something had to be done with all that product, Howk said. And so, you ended up with aluminum canoes, aluminum siding and, in this case, an aluminum home.

But while the Alcoa Care-free Home was a business decision to kick-start a market for aluminum, the result was a unique, well-crafted home for a nation about to enter the Space Age.

“They really looked at this in an artistic sense, not just in a utilitarian sense,” Howk said.
Alas, the promise of easy living doesn’t automatically come with an address on Easy Street, and the aluminum homes were foiled by the marketplace.

“It was supposed to focus on care-free, easy living,” Plouffe said. “Unfortunately, it ended up being too expensive to produce.”

Plouffe and Linsner have tried to re-create the feel and spirit of the home, kind of like going back to the future.

They have removed the chocolate brown paint that had obscured the original royal purple panels and yellow door that made the house so memorable. Much of their restoration work has been done in the kitchen, but fortunately for them, the original metal cabinets were stored away and not set out to the curb.

The original carport was enclosed in the 1990s — surprising that it took so long when you consider Rochester winters — and it will stay that way, Plouffe said.

Plouffe and Linsner have had a lot of fun researching the home and the period, and finding furniture pieces to fit their fun home.

The result of their work is a home that is unusual for Rochester. Although its broad expanse of glass creates a spacious feel, the home is not all that big, Plouffe admitted. Theirs is a home that many people like to stop by and see, but a place very few would want to live.
And that might be a good thing.

“We only have one more room to do, but that’s usually when we sell,” Plouffe laughed. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”