Best Backyard: Mid Century Style on the Lagoons

A few weekends ago, I traveled to Columbus, Indiana, a true treasure trove of modern architecture. This small town in the Midwest attracted big name architects to come work on projects such as schools, banks and churches. We loved seeing the classic public buildings that exist there, but our tour of the residential spaces was enlightening as well...

There is a small residential community in Columbus built around two narrow man made lakes called "The Lagoons". Each home has a backyard leading down to the water and it is really pretty idyllic.

This backyard and backporch is attached to a very Brady style mid-c structure which is home to a family with a big dog and lots of kids (all boys). Can you imagine playing outside all summer in this backyard? Seems like heaven for the kids AND grownups!

MORE INFO ON ARCHITECTURE IN COLUMBUS, INDIANA: Official Site

(Images: Janel Laban)

Comments (16)

LOVE THIS!!!

If you tell me there was a rope swing somewhere I just may pass out. This is like my 50's/60's summer escape fantasy dreamland...motoring out to the country, eating sandwiches on the dock, biking to town for ice cream...

Looking at this sure beats looking out my window at the traffic, filthy sidewalks and bums...

Beautiful and comfortable.

The first photo looks exactly like the view from the house I grew up in. Drifting in the rowboat in summer, and in the winter, all the neighbors would turn on their outside floodlights for skating at night. aaahhh...

My mother was right--I had it pretty good as a kid.

ahhhhhh....I can almost smell the Midwestern summer air, the grass, the water, the garden. And those blasted mosquitos... Gotta take the good with the bad I guess. Would be nice to have a house like this in the country. Any house really. But a little Modern architecture doesn't hurt.

This looks similar to some of the Frank Llyod Wright Track homes that I tour recently outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Is it Wright?

Looks fabulous -- I want. Also, would love to see more pics of the houses.

saragrz -- definitely not Wright.

Glendale, Wisconsin has a similar neighborhood of mid-cen homes around a man-made sand-bottom lake. Gotta love those '50s Midwest planners/developers. Today it's more tree-less mini-mansion around rentention pond. Blah.

Yeah a gross retention pond that the geese come and poo in all year long. Yuck.

And, not only treeless, but landscapeless! I can't believe how many of those new cookie-cutter hoods have nothing. It looks like a house fell out of the sky and someone decided to squat there. So strange.

Columbus is awsome! We lived in Indiana for a few years and always headed that way when we could.....much cooler (and cleaner) then Terre Haute!

The town seems out of place. Does anybody know how it became a design haven?

sciteach, In the 50's the head of Cummins Diesel, which is headquarted in Columbus, had the company create a fund. The fund would pay the city of Columbus for all architectural fees of public works so long as it used an architect from a list of "world renowned" architects maintained by the firm. That is the condensed version of how Columbus become modern.

holy crack what a beauty and i want the car too.

Plastolux & Nrkist,

Thanks for the info. Amazing how much interest was/is taken in design there