Defending The Big House

In Defense of the Big House
Dallas rich have built a remarkable number of architecturally significant homes. Some are decades old; others are brand-new. Does it matter that they’re the size of a small airport?

A few months ago, while sipping cocktails with some friends, the conversation shifted to local design, architecture, and Dallas mansions. As the waiter served us tiny hors doeuvres, I made an offhand remark about Dallas big houses. I think I called them obscene.

Before I continue, I must confess that I had never seriously thought about big houses as being anything other than, well, too big. I lumped all big houses into the McMansion category, consciously or not. My husband and I fled our beautiful Preston Hollow home a few years ago because our circa 1936, 4,700-square-foot, New Orleans two-story was being overwhelmed by 9,000-plus-square-foot, gated giants. We had puny 8-foot ceilings. Though we were on a full acre, our house began to look like the neighbor’s servants quarters. That experience, combined with my Chicago city-girl roots and just a pinch of effete snobbery from Columbia University, evoked a sort of knee-jerk disdain for the mega-square-footage set. We can always use more bytes, but, really, who needs three kitchens?

My companion, local designer Sherry Hayslip, ASID, was gentle. You know, she said, there are some wonderful and important things being done in our city’s ˜big houses “for all of us.

Sherry and her husband, renowned architect Cole Smith Sr., were, of course, the creators of many of Dallas’big houses, among them Lawrence and Joyce Lacerte’s magnificent Park Lane English estate, complete with orangerie; Steven and Carol Aaron’s French chef-d’oeuvre, which was featured in Betty Lou Phillips book French by Design; and Jerry and Gene Jones house on Preston and Armstrong, which is truly a masterpiece of Italian architecture and craftsmanship.

Well, I didn’t mean those big houses.

STALKING THE BIG HOUSE
Thus began my reexamination of Dallas biggest residences. Not the McMansions, big-hair houses, monster houses, or starter castles they have their own issues, and I’ll write about them another time. No, I mean the really big houses, the 10,000-plus-square-footers, which usually shelter nuclear families with 2.5 children. Dallas has a disproportionate share of these houses, and I had always dismissed them as utility hogs and pink-brick ego trips. They were nothing more, I tut-tutted, than stone-and-mortar trophies for folks with way too much money.

As part of my research, I mapped out a driving tour of some of the grandest neighborhoods in the city, from Lakewood to Highland Park and University Park, from Old Preston Hollow to Bluffview. I studied Sunnybrook Estates and Ray Nasher’s classic spread on Rockbrook, where neighbors Diane Gibby and Rod Rohrich, both plastic surgeons, have beautified the street as much as they have most Dallas women. I found Park Lane resplendent with the McCoy mansion. (They reportedly spent $300,000 on the swimming pool alone and brought in so much terracing rock that there are surely two Grand Canyons now.) I saw great big, beautiful homes in Plano.

I have been to Armstrong Avenue, and I have seen the light.

THE BIG HOUSE: A GIFT TO THE CITY?  
What great city is not marked by its beautifully designed buildings and homes? We don’t always get to museums, says Dallas writer and architectural critic Virginia McAlester, co-author with husband Lee of A Field Guide to American Houses. So we are blessed to be able to see beautiful structures around us as we run the car pool and drop off our dry cleaning.

According to Virginia, there is nothing more magical than when a knowledgeable and tasteful client who happens to have an ample budget hires a wonderful architect to build a great house. It is, she says, a collaboration of an individual, an artist, and a dream to do what has been done for generations.

I thought of the 73,746-square-foot Chateau du Triomphe, which burned to the ground in July (see Rest in Peace below). Triomphe was known for its grandiosity “the 3,000-square-foot master suite, natatorium, seven garages, and umpteen closets. But Triomphe was also a well-considered piece of architecture, lovingly initiated by Robbie Fusch and five Fusch-Serold & Partners architects in the mid-90s. In its second phase, the estate was (nearly) completed by Carol and Will Snyder. Had it not been destroyed, Chateau du Triomphe would have been one of Dallas most significant homes. Unfortunately, its passing made CNN for the magnitude of the flames, not the architectural loss.

Great architectural design has always been considered a gift to a city, says Cole. When constructing a beautiful home in Italy, an opening is left in the wall “and sometimes seating is even created”giving the public access to view, admire, and enjoy the house.

But big houses have brought more than just enjoyment to the city’s denizens.

Here, in Dallas, where business and the economy are the prevailing interests, big houses are a strong selling point for high-level executives considering the city as a new corporate home. A drive through Highland Park or Preston Hollow will sell many CEOs on the benefits of moving here, says veteran appraiser D.W. Skelton. Housing in Dallas “even big housing “remains more affordable than in most other metropolitan areas of the country.

But that is not the only economic benefit of big houses; they also create jobs. After September 11, Lynn Muse, wife of John Muse, debated whether to go forward with the plans for her English manse on Preston Road. But, she says, I realized that our building project would have the budget of a small nation, and that’s a very good thing. It has given a large number of people jobs. Over at Tom Hicks estate in Old Preston Hollow, more than 150 people are hard at work each day. Chateau du Triomphe employed so many skilled subcontractors and craftsmen”300 per day when Tommy Ford was building it “that nearly every sub in town has worked on that house. When International Harvester vice president James Deering built Vizcaya on 180 acres in Miami in 1919, 10 percent of Miami’s population was employed in the construction.

BIG MONEY EQUALS BIG HOUSES
Historically, of course, big houses are measures of prosperity “just like (don’t laugh) stoves, from Colonial fireplaces to pot-bellied stoves to a Viking in every kitchen. Our homes grew bigger as the Dow Jones reached 10,000 points, and each house had the biggest Viking or La Cornue the architect could specify. Who cooked? Didn’t matter.

At the turn of the 19th century, with the transportation and communications boom, huge fortunes were amassed, and the wealthy built residences in Cleveland, Buffalo, and Newport. Biltmore, the North Carolina home of George Vanderbilt, was, by any definition, big: 250 rooms, 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, and three kitchens. Biltmore was completed in 1895 when Vanderbilt was 33. Three years later, Dallas, still operating on a much more modest scale, was preening over its first skyscraper, the Linz Building on Main Street, which was all of seven stories tall.

In the first half of the 20th century, we saw another great revival of big homes all over the United States, Sherry says. This is when William Randolph Hearst built Hearst Castle in California; James Deering’s Vizcaya was built in Miami; and the Crespi estate, now owned by Tom and Cinda Hicks, was built on Walnut Hill Lane. All of the stately homes that line Swiss Avenue and its vicinity were built between 1910 and 1930, under the direction of Dallas great architects of the period, men such as Hal Thomson, Bertram Hill, Lang & Witchell, and Fooshee & Cheek. For instance, Hal Thomson designed H.L. Hunt’s Aldredge House, a 7,000-square-foot mansion on Swiss in 1917.

Time marched on, and only the very wealthy could afford to build their own homes until that wonderful document called the mortgage was created. The Depression slowed building, but hammers still pounded in Highland Park thanks to East Texas oil. World War II took the scale of housing down to thrifty, more manageable units in the 40s, and the bungalows in the M Streets, the Park Cities, Lakewood, and Oak Cliff were built with GI loans. Then came the ranches.

THE DEATH (AND REBIRTH) OF CRAFTSMANSHIP
In the 1930s and 40s, architects and designers began to eschew Beaux Arts ornamentation and became enamored of clean, straight lines and the machine-made, a fusion of art and technology.

The concept of handcrafted details in homes almost died out at that time, Sherry says. The Bauhaus movement forced machine-made over custom. No one had hand-forged bronze doors or handles, handcrafted mantels, or decorative pieces.

The Bauhaus influence on architecture was an egalitarian, anti-bourgeoisie, anti-wealth attitude emanating from the political temperament of the times: war and social upheaval. Walter Gropius, says author Tom Wolfe, was the Silver Prince of the Bauhaus movement. Architects such as Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came to the United States and headed major architectural schools. The intimation was that the clients were basically nuisances, good only for bankrolling the architect’s vision, which was, of course, supreme.

Bauhaus brought our cities boxes of glass, steel tinted brownish-amber, and flat rooflines. Edward Durell Stone fit into this scenario briefly, only to be expelled by the Bauhaus purists when he embraced the International Style and designed the New Delhi embassy. Locally, he designed the former residence of Jan and Robert Crandall on the corner of Park Lane and Meadowbrook Drive. This was the first million-dollar home in Dallas and was notable for its floating dining room.

Fast forward to Dallas real estate boom at the end of the 20th century, when the people building and buying mega-homes had made it big in the hottest industries du jour: Mark Cuban (dot.com), Fred and Lisa Baron (litigation), George and Dominique Perrin (telecommunications). This new wave of money gave birth to dozens of grand homes, and the concept of handcrafting returned. And we’re now seeing this appreciation of craftsmanship appearing in more typically sized homes. Twenty years ago, we built big, empty mushrooms in Dallas, says builder John Sebastian. “Today, we have great residential architecture that has filtered down to the 4,500-square-foot house in University Park.

The trickle-down effect of the custom work on the behemoth Dallas estates to more modestly sized homes may be the most powerful argument of all for the big house. Out of the work prescribed by the architects and designers of these mega-mansions has developed an entire workforce of artisans who have literally resurrected long-lost arts such as trompe loeil, faux finishing, gilding, woodwork and furniture carving, masonry, and mosaic, tile, metal, and ironwork. In a manner not unlike the patronage of the Renaissance, the wealthy in Dallas have created a golden age for local artisans that has not been seen since the turn of the last century.

On a recent trip to the East, I saw an abundance of 8,000- to 10,000-square-foot houses. None of them had the custom work that we have in Dallas, says architect Will Snyder. People in Washington, D.C., are ordering their stair rails, wood paneling, and kitchen cabinets out of catalogs.

BIG HOUSES: THE BIG PICTURE
You can guess that I have done a 180 from my big-is-bad mentality, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that big is good. I have simply concluded that, in the broader context of economics and architecture, Dallas is like any other young and prosperous city with its own fresh-faced aristocracy eager to flaunt its success. What better “or more poignant”way than to build a big house?

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RECOMMENDED READING If you’re interested in learning about grand residential architecture, pick up a copy of Great American Houses by Virginia and Lee McAlester (Abbeville Press, 1994). This book is a modern classic: it gives a stunningly in-depth study of 25 grand homes and details every aspect of the architecture. It is the only coffee-table book I’ve ever actually read”and I’ve read it twice in the three weeks since I bought it. The McAlesters are Dallas-based, as are Larry Boerder, who created the drawings throughout, and Carol Boerder-Snyder, who drew the floor plans. 
“Christine Allison

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REST IN PEACE
10330 Strait Lane

It was someone’s dream. A Dallas couple flush with success in the telecommunications industry hired one of the city’s finest architects to create a French masterpiece. The architect was Robbie Fusch of Fusch-Serold & Partners. His firm took two years to design the Perrin home on the 10-acre Strait Lane site that had once been two separate estates.

George and Dominique Perrin never intended for their dream home to become as large as it grew: 73,746 square feet in total, including some 46,000 air-conditioned square feet. Seven garages, a wash bay for the cars, a natatorium (lap pool and volleyball pool), hand-scraped wood and limestone floors, a backyard lake “the ideas just kept coming.

The home was to be magnificent. Dominique, a petite brunette, is a collector of impeccable taste. The second-story gallery, which overlooked the massive great room, would feature a sweeping panorama of her decorative art and doll collections in floor-to-ceiling glass cases. The master suite, itself as big as a house at 3,000 square feet, was one of four bedrooms. The media/family room had 200-year-old timber beams that had been shipped from New England. Not only was the attic, where the deadly fire reportedly started, completely finished, but the home also had a full 17,000-square-foot basement and technical control center. Cost of the center, circular staircase: $300,000. Though the house would need a sophisticated staff for upkeep, the massive, imported dining room chandelier could be lowered for easy cleaning by means of a winch in the attic.

In August of 1997, George and Dominique sold their unfinished dream to Dallas land investor John Lau. The Perrins reportedly had $28 million invested in the home and property and had even purchased all of the furniture. They listed the property at $14 million. John offered about $8.5 million “cash “and it was a done deal. The Perrins walked away from almost $20 million and what had become a limestone albatross.

John felt he had a deal: buying a three-quarters-completed mansion for land value. There was no way he could lose. He also did not complete the mansion, figuring that whoever would pay double-digit millions for this property would likely want the pleasure of overseeing the finish-out. While Triomphe was on the market, Oprah Winfrey and European royalty toured as potential buyers.

Two years later, John sold his investment “in another cash sale “to Jean-Raymond Boulle for about $11 million. Jean-Raymond soon erected a dark fence around the property and began finishing the home. Dallas builder Jim Shaw worked on the home for a while; architects Carol Boerder-Snyder and her husband Will were hired to complete the mansion.

In came more imported marble, classical pilasters, paneling, and mahogany. Was it for sale or did Jean-Raymond plan to move into the home? His Dallas home on Beverly Drive was on the market. The architects, who were in the home two days before it burned, believed the Boulles were moving to Strait Lane. On June 10, Jean-Raymond’s attorneys took a Wall Street Journal reporter through the home for an upcoming story on ultra-luxurious homes. This one’s price tag when completed in a few weeks: $44 million.

It was a cool evening on July 10. Early the next morning, about 1 o’clock, five years of dreams and world-class craftsmanship went up in flames as the biggest home in Dallas’ history, with a fully operational sprinkler system, burned to the ground. Smoke blanketed almost every neighborhood south of LBJ. The cinders glowed for days.