Snake Hill

Beginning in 1941, architect Carl Koch started a small neighborhood of modernist homes along the Belmont-Lincoln border in an area called Snake Hill. Today it is a mix of The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and Koch designs from the 1940s onward. Smaller and less unified than Six Moon Hill, it offers an approachable way into one of the earliest TAC clusters.

Koch built his own house on Snake Hill Road in 1941, before the war interrupted residential construction, and returned to add neighboring houses for friends and clients through the late 1940s and 1950s. Several TAC partners (most notably Norman Fletcher) designed houses here before the partnership consolidated its energies at Six Moon Hill. The hillside topography led to steeply sited, terraced layouts with full-height glazing facing the valley, anticipating moves Koch would later systematize in his Techbuilt prefab line and at Conantum. Koch also built Acorn and Deck House variants in the area before the Acorn line industrialized in nearby Lincoln.

Unlike Six Moon Hill, Five Fields, or Peacock Farm, Snake Hill never incorporated as a cooperative with shared deed restrictions. Houses were built one at a time over fifteen years, so the cluster is looser and a handful of teardown-and-rebuilds have occurred. The original Koch and TAC Mid-Century Modern houses that remain are still recognizable as the same architectural family. Modern Mass maintains the most thorough public catalog of the surviving inventory.