Uli Seit for The New York TimesA fountain outside the A. Conger Goodyear House.
In 2007, Eric Cohler bought a house on Long Island designed by the architect Edward Durell Stone, and he had many visions for it.
Most urgently, he wanted to restore the Modernist home, which the architecture critic Paul Goldberger described in The New Yorker as “one of the most important houses built between the two world wars,” from its neglected state to what it looked like — inside and out — when it was completed in 1938.
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Stone designed the house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places after preservation advocates waged a battle to save it from demolition, as a weekend retreat for A. Conger Goodyear, an industrialist and Modern art collector who was the first president of the Museum of Modern Art. Goodyear had met Stone while the architect was helping design the museum’s first permanent home.
Goodyear commissioned Stone to design the house in Old Westbury, which adhered strictly to the austere International Style popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
Mr. Cohler, an interior designer, also envisioned himself living in the single-story house, which sits at the end of a long drive on five and a half acres. But four years and more than $2 million in renovations later, Mr. Cohler is trying to sell the A. Conger Goodyear House, which he bought for $2.49 million in 2007. He is asking $4.599 million.
Uli Seit for The New York TimesWalls made entirely of glass help to evoke the feeling of being outdoors.
The exterior has intricately detailed glass-and-concrete facades, and most rooms are designed with at least one wall entirely made of glass, with views of the numerous fountains and sculptures that Mr. Cohler commissioned and installed, from Roman busts to ultramodern kinetic creations.
The glass walls, Mr. Cohler said, evoke the feeling of “being outdoors, even when you’re indoors.”
He first put the house on the market in May 2010 with Sotheby’s International Realty for $4.9 million and then relisted it in mid-April with Prudential Douglas Elliman. Mr. Cohler said that after using all of his savings and selling pieces from his own art collection to finance the renovation, he cannot afford to live in the house. He also decided that the house, with roughly 6,000 square feet of space, five bedrooms and five and a half baths, was too big for only himself and two dogs.
“I’m in love with the house,” he said. “But while I’m rambling around, I’d be lonely.”
Uli Seit for The New York TimesHand-painted ceramic tiles above a fireplace.
Mr. Cohler said he hoped a family would move in, but the listing broker, Emma Iacovone of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said families who have seen the house, which has relatively small bedrooms and the feel in many places of an art gallery, have not shown much interest.
Mr. Cohler himself never moved in, and the house has not been lived in since 1964, when Goodyear died.
In the late 1970s, the Goodyear family donated the estate, which then included about 100 acres, to the New York Institute of Technology. In 1997, the institute sold the property to developers, who had planned to tear down the main house and build smaller homes on five-acre lots, according to the World Monuments Fund, which led the fight to preserve the house.
The group was able to raise enough money to buy the property and then, in 2005, sold it to a buyer who was required to comply with restrictive limitations on changes to the exterior and interior. But that buyer, Troy Halterman, a contemporary furniture designer, never moved in and then sold the house to Mr. Cohler in 2007.
Mr. Cohler, echoing the words of architecture critics, said, “It’s a work of art.”
He added, “And it is now my work of art, and I want to entrust it to the next person or people who will be able to use it and fill it with life.”
E-mail: bigdeal@nytimes.com