A waterfront mid-century modern home in Oviedo built in 1976 for Dr. and Mrs. John Hodgin is on the market for the first time, after five decades spent entirely within the Hodgin family. The two-story, two-bedroom, two-bathroom house at 291 Maple Court sits on a 0.73-acre lot with 30 feet of pond frontage in Seminole County’s Mead Manor neighborhood, listed at $675,000.
The home was designed by Harry Merritt Jr., who taught in the University of Florida’s School of Architecture for 35 years, and its debut on the open market is being handled by Dominic Persampiere of Optima Real Estate, according to Orlando Weekly. Per the listing, the Hodgin Residence is the design Merritt was most proud of throughout his career. That career output was small by design: over his decades practicing in North and Central Florida, Merritt completed roughly 30 custom residential homes and 40 commercial buildings, according to WUFT News, making any surviving Merritt house a scarce find for buyers.
The property carries unobstructed views of an Old Florida landscape and includes a large enclosed courtyard, features the Orlando Weekly report ties to Merritt’s broader emphasis on surrounding landscapes in his residential work. Inside, the home features native Florida cypress finishes, custom kitchen cabinetry, floor-to-ceiling glass, polished concrete floors, and a stone breezeway with a brick fireplace, per Homes.com. The listing’s per-square-foot value works out to roughly $298 across the home’s 2,266 square feet, per Zillow.
A Design Rooted in the Sarasota School
Merritt’s architectural lineage traces directly back to some of Florida’s most influential postwar modernists. He studied under Paul Rudolph and Walter Gropius, and earned his Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, according to the Orlando Weekly report and corroborated by the University of Florida Special and Area Studies Collections. Born in North Carolina in 1929, he served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Korea from 1951 to 1953 before completing his Harvard degree in 1955…