By listModern
With insights from Ron & Steven Mangas
Architects & Design
Architecture is unusually difficult to understand from a distance.
A photograph can describe a façade. A floor plan can explain organization. Neither tells you exactly what happens when you enter a room, move through a sequence of spaces, look back toward the landscape, or suddenly understand why an architect placed a window precisely where it is.
Sometimes the best way to understand a house is simply to open the door.
That idea sits at the center of the Modern Home Tour, a series that has spent more than fifteen years giving the public access to private residential architecture across North America.
THE BEGINNING
The story began in Austin in 2010, when James “Jamie” Leasure founded Modern Home Tours around a straightforward idea: invite people inside noteworthy modern houses and let them meet the architects, designers, and builders who created them.
The organization subsequently evolved into the Modern Architecture + Design Society, or MA+DS, and the tours expanded to cities throughout the United States and Canada.
Jamie remains founder and president, and longtime vice president Ken Shallcross has become equally familiar to the architects and local partners who make the tours possible. Together, Jamie and Ken have spent years traveling, producing tours, photographing projects, writing about architecture and building relationships with residential design communities across the continent.
The format they developed is intentionally direct. Rather than mount an exhibition about architecture, MA+DS lets the architecture become the exhibition. A collection of privately owned houses opens for a day. Visitors travel between them at their own pace, and the architects, designers, builders, and sometimes homeowners are there to talk about what they made and why.
BRINGING THE TOUR TO WASHINGTON
Washington entered that network in 2017.
That year, Ron and Steven Mangas, through listModern, invited MA+DS to bring its Modern Home Tour series to the Washington metropolitan area. MA+DS brought an established national platform and years of experience producing architectural tours. The Mangases brought the local network and a conviction that Washington’s residential architecture could support a larger public audience.
The collaboration became the DC Metro Modern Home Tour, now known as the DMV Modern Home Tour. The relationship has continued ever since.
For Ron Mangas, much of the work begins months before anyone buys a ticket. Houses have to be found. Architects are contacted. Homeowners have to be willing to open deeply personal spaces to hundreds of strangers for an afternoon. The eventual group also has to make sense together. A tour composed simply of expensive or photogenic houses is not necessarily an interesting architectural tour.
Over the years, the Washington tour has included work by architects including Mark McInturff, FAIA, Robert M. Gurney, FAIA, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, FAIA, Travis Price, FAIA, BLDUS, KUBE Architecture, and many others.
The range is part of the point. Washington modernism is not one style, period, or material palette. The tour has moved between new houses and renovations, urban infill and wooded sites, highly refined contemporary work and homes connected to longer regional modernist traditions.
CURATING THE TOUR
Ron’s role has expanded beyond selecting houses. He has increasingly helped tell the stories of the architects and professionals involved, market the Tour locally, and connect it to Washington’s broader design community. For 2026, MA+DS identifies the collection simply as “Curated by Ron Mangas, Jr.”
That distinction reflects what the Tour asks of its local partners. listModern is a specialized real estate platform focused on architect-designed homes, including their representation when they enter the market. Most Tour houses are not for sale. Here, the work is identifying architecture worth experiencing and creating access to it.
A DESIGN COMMUNITY AROUND THE HOUSES
For years, the Washington Tour has ended with a gathering hosted by listModern, bringing architects, designers, homeowners, builders, friends, and participants together after the last house closes.
The national organization provides the framework. In Washington, the Tour has also become a recurring point of connection within the local design community.
BEYOND ONE SATURDAY
The annual Tour can also serve as the largest public doorway into a more continuous conversation about modern residential architecture in Washington and the Mid-Atlantic.
Some of what comes next may be smaller: twenty or thirty people gathered inside an architect’s own home for a conversation about a lifetime of work; a visit devoted to one significant house rather than six; an evening with an architect, homeowner or photographer explaining a project in the space itself.
For Ron and listModern, that direction extends work already happening around the Tour and beyond real estate transactions.
Finding the architecture. Knowing who designed it and why. Building trust with the people who live there. Documenting the work. Introducing architects, owners and enthusiasts to one another. Creating opportunities to experience significant houses firsthand.
The Modern Home Tour has provided an unusually public expression of that work since 2017. What comes next can build from there, occasionally through another front door.
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