Claude and Helen Habberstad?s work is little-known outside of one New Jersey county On a late fall day in 1925, young couple Claude and Helen Habberstad alighted from Lackawanna station in Montville, New Jersey, and made their way up a winding dirt road. The Habberstads had been studying topographical maps, looking for a place convenient to New York City to build a weekend home.
?That very weekend we put a deposit on a tract of 13 acres located within walking distance of the station. It had a long road frontage, a brook, springs, trees and plenty of boulders,? Claude recalled to the Boonton Times-Bulletin in 1959. An ordinary couple with the same maps at their disposal might have chosen a flat plot of land, already cleared of trees and cumbersome rocks. But the Habberstads were no ordinary couple.
Power couples in the world of design and architecture have long captured the public imagination: Massimo and Lella Vignelli, Florence and Hans Knoll, and, most famously, Charles and Ray Eames.
We assume all of their stories have been told or else lost to history, but the works of Claude and Helen Habberstad?he an architect, she a painter?are known primarily to residents of Morris County, New Jersey, where the couple built as many as 20 homes. These homes are concentrated around Taylortown Road in Montville, Woodcrest Road in Parsippany, and Sheep Hill Road in Boonton.
The distinctive features of these homes, built into boulders or else camouflaged with the verdant landsca...