To say that the Boardmans’ house is like a fish out of water is putting it mildly. Colonials, McMansions, and converted barns surround this 1957 steel-and-glass modular box on stilts. The five-bedroom home, with its single-pane industrial windows and prefab Acorn partitions, would fit in more with Southern California’s Case Study Houses than this bucolic corner of Carlisle, Massachusetts. But that’s part of its charm.

Originally commissioned by the Megowens, a young couple with a penchant for modernist design, the house was constructed by local architect John Nickols. Working off a plan published in F.R.S. Yorke’s 1937 classic The Modern House in England, the 24-foot-wide-by-108-foot-long house was built with steel support beams placed every 12 feet, acting as natural room dividers, and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at nothing but nature.

Barbara and David Boardman bought the house in 1987, and lived here with their two sons for 18 years before finally deciding it was time to renovate. It wasn’t an easy task. The house was built with an unforgiving system of plumbing and electricity, meaning that Barbara, acting as the general contractor, had to collaborate extensively with her architect (and sister), Abby Suckle, to devise innovative solutions for updating the 50-year-old design. One year and $200,000 later, the unconventional house that “raised a good deal of wry Yankee comment,” as the Boston Globe wrote in 1964, has proven to be a good—if at times troublesome—home and a pleasant reminder of New England’s often over-looked modern architectural history.