Julian Street Jr. residence

Harrison, primarily known as a monuments architect through his works in New York City like Rockefeller Center and the United Nations complex,[1] also designed a few private residences.

Harrison designed and built the residence at 710 Long Hill Road West as an unconventional experiment in the early Modernist architecture that was just being introduced in America during the late 1930s.

[3] After negotiations, RCA became the largest tenant for the central skyscraper of Rockefeller Center and RKO occupied the second building.

[6] Both Narcissa and Julian Street Jr. were the children of wealthy Gilded Age American families, and it was not surprising that they later married.

[11] The Street family considered Harrison a skyscraper architect, so his decision to both plan and supervise the construction of their house in Scarborough, a hamlet of the village of Briarcliff Manor, surprised them.

[20] It presents a very private and industrial front, with stone and glass, and a ramp path to the door, like a conveyor belt in a factory.

[20] There is little ornamental decoration, it is simply constructed with industrial materials in keeping with Breuer and Gropius's idea of "unit construction" or the bringing together of "standard units to create a technologically simple but functionally complex whole," and the use of new materials to create art design that reflected the age of industry.

[22] In the interior of the house, the forms of the rooms were simple but combined to make a more complex structure like Breuer and Gropius advocated.

[12] Harrison designing this house to give the impression of being on a luxury liner or yacht aesthetically reflects the industrial age.

Built on undulating rocky landscaping, the house looks as if it were a ship with porthole windows, its large stone prow cutting through waves of water (the serpentine wall).

Other changes were the removal of the stone wall and guardrail by the driveway, which was then paved with asphalt, and building a playhouse at the top of a rock pile in front of the house.

Niosi left the exterior relatively unchanged, but he said that when he bought the house, it was very "austere" inside—the walls were simple white or beige in color, with no ornamentation; the only decoration was on the unique Harrison-designed spiral staircase to the second floor, which had brass bamboo supports that Niosi left alone; he stated that the staircase had been built in Japan and exported in one piece.

[22] This redecoration gave this residence a unique combination of a conventional 1930s Arts and Crafts interior design with an unconventional early Modernist exterior.

The living room was split to include a home theater and the wet bar was replaced to accommodate a film collection.