Why Nili Lotan Feels So at Home in Her Marcel Breuer House

O n a hazy Friday afternoon, fashion designer Nili Lotan’s Croton-on-Hudson kitchen smells of butter, sugar and toasting almonds. The galley-style space is just wide enough for Lotan, dressed in a denim shirt, barrel-leg jeans and flip-flops, to extract a baking sheet from the oven, dust it with powdered sugar and pile hot cookies onto a plate. She heads to the dining table, free of clutter like the rest of the compact house, which was designed in 1953 by Marcel Breuer. Over a batch of her mother’s almond crescents, Lotan points out some of the moves she’s come to understand as the architect’s signatures—starting with the freestanding fireplace, companionably close to a built-in sofa, which rises from the bluestone floor and disappears into a slatted-cypress ceiling. It lends the room a weight that seems to anchor the house to its dramatic site, on a promontory high above the Hudson River, about 40 miles north of Manhattan.

In 2020, when Lotan first came up to Croton in search of a weekend escape from her home in Tribeca, she had an instant reaction to the view. “It took me back to my childhood,” she recalls. “The water of the Mediterranean was right in front of me again.”

Lotan grew up in Israel, where her father developed real estate along the coast north of Tel Aviv. As soon as he finished a new house, the family would move in and the older house would be sold. The process sharpened Lotan’s eye for architecture; for a while she considered making it a career. Instead, she turned to fashion.

For Breuer, who was born in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, there was little doubt about his future profession. From 1920, when he enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, as an 18-year-old carpentry apprentice, until his death in New York in 1981, he designed a constant stream of buildings, from schools and convents to museums and research centers, and more than 100 houses, of which an estimated 60 were built. Most of them are clustered around the northeastern U.S. and are still occupied today.

Like many architects, Breuer saw houses as opportunities to work through new ideas at a manageable scale. But he also understood them as complex, highly social spaces. Speaking to a roomful of students in 1950, Breuer took issue with Le Corbusier’s provocative 1923 slogan: “a house is a machine for living in.” That might be true, countered the second-generation modernist, “but you don’t want to get greasy if you lean against the wall. You want to have something simpler, more elemental, more generous and more human than a machine.”

By the time Breuer was taking on major commissions such as the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1952-58, with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1964-66), his formal and material language had already coalesced in his residential projects. For many scholars, they’re his most important contribution to architecture.

Mathias Remmele, co-curator of a 2003 Breuer retrospective at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, praises the passion as well as the logic in Breuer’s work and identifies the architect’s need to express himself through construction as he might have in carpentry. This is especially visible in his houses. Lotan’s, while neither as spatially inventive as the multi-level residences Breuer designed for himself nor as theatrical as his linear compositions, has the self-contained intimacy of a cottage—some feat, considering it has four bedrooms and two separate entrances. (A formal entry leads into the living room foyer; a service door heads into the kitchen. Winking at social convention, Breuer placed the two entrances side by side.) Behind the house and up a gentle slope is a one-bedroom guest house with its own kitchen and living area.

Lotan and her second husband, the musician David Broza, use their Croton retreat as a place to gather friends, spend time with their adult children and decompress from city life. “It’s been a godsend,” she says. Since moving to New York 45 years ago, she’s been working without a stop.

“It took a moment, but once I got my first job I took off,” Lotan says of her progress through the design studios of Liz Claiborne, Adrienne Vittadini, Nautica and Ralph Lauren, whose namesake once told her she had “immaculate taste.” At 40, with three young children and a marriage that was coming to its natural end, Lotan decided it was time to go into business for herself. She invested $25,000 and produced a six-piece collection; a few years later, when Vogue rated her button-down in Italian cotton poplin the best shirt of the 2006 fall season, the brand’s sales soared.

As the company’s CEO and head of its small design team, Lotan runs a tight operation. She’s built her brand around a nucleus of sophisticated, well-conceived basics that get minor adjustments each season but never go out of style. “You design a 120-piece collection, but at the end of the day there are five great pieces that drive business, the ones people wear,” she says, pointing to Ralph Lauren’s polo shirt as proof of concept. “So I asked myself, why do I need 120? I’ll design the five. At the end of the day, you want to look stylish and cool. You don’t need all those clothes.” You might not, but someone clearly does—in 2022, Nili Lotan hit $100 million in annual sales.

C ommissioning Marcel Breuer to design the house in Croton was the idea of another fashion self-starter, Vera Neumann. The Connecticut-born daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Neumann studied at the Cooper Union in New York and built a thriving graphic textiles business with her Austrian-born husband, George. Tablecloths, dish towels, napkins, fabrics by the yard: Vera made them all, hallmarked with a ladybug and her boldly inked signature. Her breakthrough came in 1947, when the couple scored some military-surplus parachute silk and adapted her designs to fashion scarves, which became an instant hit. The Neumanns were able to move out of the city and hire their friend Breuer to make them a house. Before long, its crisp white rooms teemed with children, pets, houseplants, folk art—and painting and sculpture by their friends, among them Max Bill, Josef Albers and Ben Shahn. Alexander Calder, a member of the Neumanns’ left-leaning social circle, often showed up for dinner with a gouache tucked under one arm or a piece of jewelry as a gift for Vera. When he surprised her on one visit with a stabile (“The Sun at Croton,” 1961, now in the collection of the Israel Museum), he went the extra mile of siting the VW-sized sculpture in the middle of the couple’s front lawn.

Scarves proved to be much better business than even the Neumanns could have imagined. By the early 1970s, the Vera Companies were pulling in more than $100 million annually—in pre-inflation dollars—and Vera asked Breuer to build her a wing with an indoor swimming pool. Eventually, after falling a few times on the unforgiving stone floors, she sold the property to Patricia Pastor, a former fashion colleague, and her husband, Barry Friedman, the art and design dealer. “Vera appreciated that we appreciated it,” Friedman recalls.

On one of their early visits to Croton, Pastor remembers seeing a gargantuan Calder necklace pinned to a length of burlap on Vera’s dining room wall, a styling trick Peggy Guggenheim had used in Venice with her own Calder jewelry collection. Opening a drawer, the petite designer pulled out a butterfly-shaped Calder brooch as big as a medieval breastplate. “Vera told us: ‘Most of the time I just use it as a trivet,’” Pastor says. “What a scream! But that was so Breuer, when you think about it—his houses were not precious, he was not precious. It was an incredibly comfortable house to live in and maintain. Vera was there for 32 years, and we were there for 32 more.”


B efore Lotan entered the picture, the property was briefly owned by serial Breuer restorationists Ken Sena and Joseph Mazzaferro. They arrived just in time to replace rattling doors and windows with thermal-pane glass and repair the radiant heating, numbering each of the flagstones before prying them up from the floor so that they could be returned to exactly the same position. Lotan bought the house furnished so that she could move in right away, picking up a spiral-shaped pendant light by Man Ray from Edition MAT and a pair of loop chairs, which she is especially fond of.

She’s been settling in gradually, a process that so far has meant having lots of friends over, cooking her way through her mother’s Hebrew recipe book and revitalizing the gardens. Breuer rarely worked with landscape designers, preferring to position his houses in relation to their unimproved sites. But here he took the job on personally, designing several low stone walls that snake around the building and prop up a cantilevered wall here or define a terrace there. To construct them, he hired Italian masons who had come to Croton in the 1890s to work on the New Croton Dam. Breuer was so pleased with the project that a site rendering appears on the cover of his 1955 monograph, “Sun and Shadow: The Philosophy of an Architect.”

To Lotan’s eye, the fluid stone walls create “a more poetic situation” for the house. “[Breuer] thought about them as part of the plan—he didn’t just build the house and then say, OK, what’s going to be on the outside?” Standing on the terrace, she gestures to a place where the walls come together to define the edges of a flag-shaped swimming pool. “Here, you are completely transformed,” she marvels. “Here, you are in Greece.”

Lotan’s own work allows her to identify closely with the architect’s intentions. “Breuer was thinking so much about the people who live here, I can tell,” she says. “You can design clothes because you like to design clothes, but then you really don’t think about the woman who’s going to wear them—how she’s going to feel in them. That’s all I think about. I try on everything. I think Breuer had the same thing. He wanted the people who live here to feel good, too.”

It’s hard, even for Lotan, a woman who knows her way around a knotty design problem, to understand the compulsion some people have to alter a Breuer house. As far as she’s concerned, even her sliver of a kitchen is exactly the right size. Broza is perfectly happy grilling his steaks outdoors. And though she’s making plans to update some of the furniture, she’s in no hurry to get that done. Lotan finds the house a success in the same way that a white cotton shirt can be a success—because it’s well-thought out and well-made. For her, that’s enough.

Introducing art has been the biggest challenge, she admits. In Neumann’s time, the walls were cluttered with jubilant color. Lotan is aiming for something completely different, and she’s begun making studio visits to a few painters she admires, including, last spring, to Michal Rovner in Tel Aviv.

Lotan has also been thinking about the Calder stabile that once stood in Vera’s front yard. Somehow it seemed both joyful and elemental, of Breuer’s time and immeasurably beyond. “Which is something that would be my dream to bring back,” she says, smiling.