The McElroy House. Newly priced and set on five private acres in Willistown Township, with a stream running through its wooded grounds, this is the home legendary builder Robert McElroy designed and built for his own family in 1975. McElroy built more than 200 contemporary homes along the Main Line and on Valley Forge Mountain from the late 1950s through the 1970s, but his own home is where he created his most personal and ambitious work.
It was designed for a life surrounded by art, with walls made for paintings and sculpture, a sprawling first-floor art studio, and soaring, light-filled spaces that turn the entire house into a gallery. The primary suite includes a lofted library overlooking the living space below, while a detached four-car garage includes McElroy's own purpose-built woodworking shop.
The soul of the house is its woodwork by Horace Hartshaw, who worked alongside the iconic woodworker Wharton Esherick in the 1960s. Its centerpiece is the spiral staircase in the library, where massive hand-carved treads seem to float around a single central column as they rise to a book-lined loft.
It is as much sculpture as staircase. The kitchen is a work of art in its own right, with Hartshaw's warm wood cabinetry, a gently curving island, and a live-edge beam framing a picture window onto the woods. That same craftsmanship carries into the bathrooms, which feature Hartshaw's custom wood cabinetry.
Throughout the house, he created additional staircases, solid doors with hand-carved pulls, flowing stair rails, desks, shelving, and ladders. Each piece was made by hand for its place in this house. McElroy described his work as finding an interesting site and interfering with it as little as possible.
To achieve this, he clad the house in bald cypress, the wood Frank Lloyd Wright favored for many of his Usonian houses for its natural durability. Known as "the wood eternal," the cypress was reclaimed from local mushroom farms and has weathered to blend into the surrounding woods, so the house lives as one with its site.
For all its seclusion, the house sits in the coveted Radnor Hunt area of Malvern, just minutes from Route 202, the Paoli train station with SEPTA and Amtrak service, and the shops and restaurants of downtown Malvern. The McElroy House is offered as-is and awaits its next steward: a buyer who values original, irreplaceable craftsmanship and has the vision to restore and care for this remarkable home.
For those drawn to pedigreed architecture and a truly private natural setting, it is a rare opportunity to own a piece of the region's modern history and shape its next chapter.
