Property Watch: In Celebration of Robert Rummer
Robert Rummer was known for putting a wall of glass at the rear to capture the backyard, as in this 1968 house in Garden Home.
When Robert Rummer started building homes in 1959, he flipped the script. Instead of putting the focus on the front facade, with its picture window facing the lawn, Rummer put a wall of glass to the rear to capture the back. Back then, “It was very radical to ignore the street,” Rummer told Oregon Home magazine in 2011.
Not only that, but Rummer’s front doors would open into glass-walled atriums, rather than formal foyers, with the living spaces and circulation often wrapped around the garden space for a connected plan that felt fluid between inside and out. That was Rummer’s ethos all along, as he described it in that 2011 interview: “Houses that bring the inside out or the outside in. I don’t even know what’s this midcentury modern. No one called it that back then. The lenders just knew they didn’t like them.”
Decades later, Rummer’s homes are credited with bringing modernism to the Oregon middle class. California had Joseph Eichler. Oregon had Robert Rummer. Rummer died on January 31, 2025, at age 97.
Before 1959, Rummer worked in insurance. His wife, Phyllis, took a trip to California, and saw an Eichler-designed home there, returning to tell her husband that she would prefer one over their more traditional abode. Rummer wasn’t immediately convinced until he visited one for himself. It was enough to inspire him to make a career switch to developer and builder, hire an Eichler-adjacent architect named A. Quincy Jones for the designs, and establish Rummer Homes. He went on to build 750 houses between 1959 and 1975 in the Portland metro area, 300 of which are in the modernist style, including his own in the Bohmann Park subdivision of Garden Home.
According to Oregon Made, Rummer built many of his homes on spec, without a down payment from buyers, and a 1965 advertisement touted prices as low as $21,500. In recent years, modernist Rummers have garnered a devoted following, with prices climbing alongside public interest—enough so that before his passing, Rummer gave his blessing to a new local company called Rummer Development to continue carrying out his game-changing designs.
More importantly, it looks like they still eschew the big front window to the street, of which Rummer would have approved: “Every house in the old days had a big front window and a big front porch where people could sit and watch the neighbors go by,” said Rummer. “And you go into one of my houses and you don’t know what your neighbors are doing because you can’t see them. You can walk through the house in the nude and nobody will see you.”
Check out the Rummers we’ve profiled over the years:
A Modest Rummer in Beaverton
Beaverton
In 2021, this modest Rummer was purported to be the first on the market since 2019, wooing buyers with its pitch-perfect time capsule vibes.
Status: Sold for $696,900 on 8/27/2021, after being listed for $550,000 on 7/15/2021
A Serene Rummer in a Neighborhood Full of Them
Garden Home
The Bohmann Park subdivision in Washington County is considered the Rummer mecca, and where Rummer built his own house in 1966. This listing had 2,500 square feet and an updated kitchen with walnut cabinets, as well as classic Rummer details. It went pending after only five days on the market, and sold for more than double its 2014 sale price.
Status: Sold for $1,285,000 on 9/30/2022, after being listed for $1,199,000 on 9/15/2022
A Rare and Dreamy Rummer in Garden Home
Garden Home
This Rummer Model K-4 floor plan was built in 1968 on a .28-acre lot, and according to the listing agent was one of the rarer Rummer plans to be constructed. It felt light, bright, and dreamy, thanks to white concrete floors, updated bathrooms and kitchen, and a central atrium with a vaulted glass ceiling and mature plants reaching for the sun.
Status: Sold for $1,300,000 on 5/11/23, after being listed for $1,175,000 on 4/ 20/2023
What’s a Rummer House? A Gorgeous One Is for Sale in Beaverton
Beaverton
The many sleek updates to this Rummer, from new windows to the teak cabinetry and banana leaf wallpaper in the kitchen, as well as a backyard overhauled with Japanese-inspired landscaping, preserved the original charm and only amped up the home’s inherent cool factor.
Status: Sold for $950,000 on 9/29/2023, after being listed for $997,000 on 6/22/2023
A Rad Rummer Remodel with an ADU Out Front
Beaverton
This was the first courtyard model—number OC-041 to be exact—that we peeked inside, given a front-to-back overhaul by the owner. We appreciated how it married the new—like a brand-new, 209-square-foot detached office/ADU out front and an expansive kitchen with 12-foot-long peninsula—with the old, including the original fireplace brick and a cedar accent wall in the living room.
Status: Sold on 12/20/2023 for $900,000, after being listed for $1,150,000 on 9/21/2023
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