home of distinction: boulder's magical mushroom

Renegade architect Charles Haertling was a 20th-century visionary who left behind a legacy of unusual homes, including a mushroom-shaped north Boulder home that some believe is his most memorable creation.

By Lisa Shumate

It’s been listed among the “world’s weirdest houses,” lauded as a masterpiece in the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, and made famous by its cameo in Woody Allen’s 1973 futuristic comedy, Sleeper. It’s been loved by tourists, who make a point of driving by it, and loathed by some neighbors who fought to prevent it from being built.

But to Barbara Brenton, who watched it materialize from the ground up and raised her four daughters in it over the last 33 years, the 6,400-square-foot work of art known as the “mushroom house” is something far more than an architectural oddity.

“It just feels like home,” says Brenton, 75, who still lives in the Boulder home with a daughter and two grandchildren.

It was the spring of 1969 when Brenton, a piano teacher, and her late husband, Stanley, a surgeon, sat on a vast grassy hillside in what is now the Wonderland Lake subdivision, brainstorming ideas for their dream house with friend and renegade architect Charles Haertling. They knew they didn’t want a box-shaped home like the ones sweeping across the landscape at the time, and they liked the creative flair they’d seen in Haertling’s other local works. These included a jagged-roofed house modeled after a yucca pod, a concrete-block-and-steel home shaped like a starship, and an optometry clinic modeled after an eyeball.

Barbara told Haertling what she wanted—an efficient, functional living space with an aesthetic that reflected her family’s unconventional taste. He delivered what some consider the most memorable house of his tragically short-lived career.

“I told Chuck I didn’t like angles, so he went wild with the curved lines,” Barbara says. From the street, the house unmistakably resembles a mushroom, with a curved overhanging roof and smooth white texture that make you feel as if you’re standing under the shelter of a giant toadstool when you knock on the front door. But in reality, Haertling had barnacles—hard, bulbous crustaceans that attached themselves to the ships in his navy days—in mind when he built the house.

Set on a sloped one-third-acre lot overlooking Linden Lake, the house incorporates five spherical pods supported by a cluster of central pillars, or stems. In the spirit of “organic architecture,” a term coined by Wright in the late 1930s to describe structures that fit seamlessly into the landscape, the house looks perfectly in place, as if it has grown out of the hillside on its own.

“Instead of being an imitation of Frank Lloyd Wright, it was an emulation,” says Haertling’s son, Joel, 47, who lives in Boulder. His father took the genre of organic architecture and expanded on it, he says, often modeling his homes after objects in nature, such as a poinsettia blossom or an aspen leaf.

Mushroom Womb

Step inside the Brenton home and Haertling’s unique style is even more apparent. There isn’t a right angle in the place. Instead, curved walls and small circular windows abound, accented by bright colors and ’70s-era white globe light fixtures.

The main level is shaped a bit like a flower, with a large round terrarium at its center and five “petals” extending outward into each of the five pods. In one pod is the family room, complete with an expansive deck (one of six in the house) overlooking the lake and almost completely shaded by the overhanging curvilinear roof. It was in the yard below that Allen filmed several scenes of Sleeper.

The kitchen features long, curved, white countertops, a round window above the sink, and yet another deck overlooking a lovely aspen grove. In the adjacent formal dining room, deep purple accents the walls (picked precisely to match a piece of artwork the Brentons acquired in Mexico), and a funky Danish globe light hangs over the oval table, giving the room a truly futuristic look.

The sun-drenched music room, which has hosted such celebrities as flutist James Galway, violinist Sarah Chang and pianist Alexei Sultanov, includes a crescent-shaped pink couch, an exquisite collection of Boulder artwork and what Barbara calls “perfect acoustics” for the frequent fundraising concerts held here. The master bedroom, also on this floor, features a circular window looking out toward a distant view of the CU campus, and a private deck nestled in a sheltering pine grove.

“Chuck had wanted it to feel something like a womb, protective, and it is,” Barbara says. “It has a warm, protective feeling about it.”

At the home’s center is a circular staircase made of long vertical rods that span the three stories. (If you think of this house as a mushroom, you cannot help but imagine that this is the stem.) Climb the stairs to the top floor and you’ll find a round study with stellar views, as well as a walk-out roof where the four Brenton daughters spent many a summer day sunbathing.

In the floor below the main level, in a room that somehow feels underground even though it’s well above it, is an expansive recreation room complete with cheerful lime-green, maroon and yellow walls, and four small bedrooms jutting out from it. Each two share a deck and all have narrow crescent-shaped windows with a mountain view. “He really wanted to bring the outside in,” says Barbara of Haertling’s vision.

Legends and Legacies

Nearly 3.5 decades later, the two-year construction of the house, which began in 1972, is still the stuff of architectural legends for the Brentons, the Haertlings and anyone else who was involved in the project.

Because it was Boulder’s first foam house and so oddly shaped, finding someone to head up the job was difficult. “No contractor would take it,” Barbara says. “They couldn’t figure out the plans.”

Nearby neighbors were not pleased with the prospect of a traffic-drawing tourist attraction and complained to the city about its height, prompting Haertling to modify the plans. Ultimately, the project took a year longer than expected.

“It was like creating a huge piece of art and it seemed like it took forever,” says Barbara, who visited the job site almost daily.

Late Boulder artist Kim Fields was commissioned to create the home’s skeleton, essentially a giant jungle gym of steel rebar twisted into five pods and supported by cinderblocks. Then workers covered the entire skeleton in plastic, sprayed over it with shaving-cream–like polyurethane foam and topped it off with a weatherproofing coat.

The job site was like a playground for Haertling’s teenage sons, who climbed on the steel frame and, occasionally, the new, somewhat fragile foam roof. “I remember being up on top of the roof with Joel, sitting on the foam, and I fell through to my waist. There were a couple of stories below me,” recalls John Haertling, now 45 and a Louisville resident. “Somebody just pulled me up, put another piece of plastic down and sprayed over it.”

In 1983, Charles Haertling died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at age 55, cutting short a promising architectural career and leaving behind a devastated wife and family. But more than two decades later, he’s also left more than 40 buildings designed with his unique vision. (For a map of these, log on to www.atomix.com/haertling.)

And at the “mushroom house,” he’s left a family with a lifetime of memories from living in a home like no other. “It really has been an extraordinary experience,” Barbara says.

Lisa Shumate is a freelance journalist and mother of four who lives in Lyons, Colorado.


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