BUILDING A DESIGN TRADITION

EARLY IN HIS CAREER Richard Davis was like most architects: He was anxious to take the ideas established in his graduate thesis and incorporate them in a building-any building.

More than 20 years after he graduated from Princeton University with a master’s in architecture, his thesis-floor plans and exterior drawings of an elementary school designed with the kind of cubic forms you’d expect of any architect who studied with Michael Graves, the father of the postmodern architectural movement-has yet to be built in any form. Davis came close once, early in his career, when he was focusing exclusively on projects that were in allegiance with his Princeton training, when he was designing what he calls “contemporary things that pushed the envelope of architectural design theory.”

When the work didn’t materialize, he quickly discovered the key to the business of architecture (which has little to do with the design of architecture): “When you’re working on people’s houses, particularly in Dallas, Texas, you just don’t get too many clients who are willing to have their houses look like they’re pushing the envelope of contemporary architectural design theory,” he says.

“People don’t want to live in something that looks like that.”



Reshaping Tradition

From a hole of an office-located on an architect’s row along the western fringe of Highland Park-Richard Davis is helping to shape the architectural landscape of Dallas’ pricier neighborhoods.

The space is strikingly devoid of the kind of trappings you’d expect of an architect who designs what he calls “dream homes,” some of which are especially dreamy, Bo Pilgrim’s 20,000-square-foot French Renaissance-style chateau the dreamiest (in an Aaron Spelling sort of way).

Stacks of phone books keep his drawing table balanced. Shelves purchased from The Container Store are overburdened with reference books like The Magnificent Builders and back issues of Architectural Digest and House & Garden, His work table, nothing more than a hollow-core door balanced on top of a flat file for architectural drawings, is blanketed with stacks of blueprints and rolls of tissue tracing paper.

It is a creative environment that could only be described as somewhere between those periods of design known as Post-College and Still Struggling. And yet Davis, at 46, has emerged from both.

In the ’80s, before he was getting the big commissions, he officed in a custom-designed space located on top of the old Nostromo. In those days, a well-designed office in a hip location was about all the up-and-coming architect had to show for himself.

But that was then. “That was an image,” Davis says. “Now I don’t care. My office is a total mess, but it’s a working office.” He pauses. “You know, people want what I do, not what my office looks like.”

He answers his own phone, makes his own coffee, meets with clients himself. Hire “Richard Drummond Davis, Architect” and you get Richard Drummond Davis, the architect.

His tendency towards a kind of mind-numbing architect-speak gives way to an everyday vernacular during consultations. His habit is to sketch in front of the client in a give-and-take that reduces architecture from theory to practice. (“How big do you want the bathroom?” “Do you want a small laundry room, a medium laundry room or a large laundry room?” “How wide do you want the front porch?”)

“He’s so caught up in his designs, he’s not even aware of his surroundings,” says client Mary Sailer, who lives in a Davis-designed French Country-style house in Highland Park. “I’d love to crawl inside his mind and see his visions. He could design the rest of his life and never duplicate.”

He says he’ll accept work from anybody, though, of course, it isn’t just anybody who comes knocking on Davis’ door. His client roster looks like a page out of the Dallas social directory: A.H. Belo heir Rusty Jackson; furniture executive Jay Smith and his wife Elizabeth ; trucking executive Steve Aaron and his wife Carol.

He designed a Swedish Baroque house for transplant surgeon Goran Klintmalm and his wife Tina; restored and doubled the size of an Italian Renaissance-style home (the 1992 Thêta Showhouse) for Armand Hammer Foundation chairman Michael Hammer and his wife Dru; designed a Georgian-style home for developer George Underwood m and his wife Andrea. And while he shies away from any sort of signature “Davis took,” all of his projects, he says, “have presence-and you can feel that.”

So, yes, he studied with Michael Graves- the prolific architect who designed the Swan and Dolphin hotels for Walt Disney World as well as nearly 600 products, ranging from arm -chairs to teapots-but Davis has built his following far from Graves’ school of postmodernism. Right now, he has 16 projects in various stages of the design process. And not a one of them has anything resembling a cubic form projecting at an angle through a wall.

“You can be blessed by success because the world likes what you do,” notes Graves. “At the same time, you can adhere to a great personal style and be an absolute flop at it. There are architects who do wonderful generic work and have excellent reputations in their community. It depends on the mood of society and the culture in general.”

Georgian Renaissance

HlS FIRST BUILDINGS WERE MADE OF TlNKERtoys and Lincoln Logs. Davis knew he wanted to become an architect after he composed an essay for a ninth grade English assignment at Dallas’ Franklin Junior High. “When I wrote that paper I thought that being an architect would be a practical way to satisfy my creative urges,” says Davis who, like any architect possessed of a little ambition, had his eye set on designing big buildings.

Armed with an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas and his masters from Princeton, he went to work at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Assoc., the prestigious New York firm responsible for the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall, the Denver Symphony Hall and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. A casualty of company-wide downsizing during the mid-’70s building recession, Davis returned to Dallas in 1977 and struck out on his own, soliciting commissions from his parents’ friends. He designed a garden room for attorney Bob Rain and his wife Gene; a deck for heart surgeon Arnold Kassanoff, Like Graves-originally known as the “Cubist Kitchen King” for all the Cubist-style kitchen remodelings he did early in his career-Davis was building his practice on a foundation of add-ons and re-dos.

Then he got a call from George Underwood III.

The real estate developer had purchased an empty lot in Highland Park and was looking for an architect to fill it with a Georgian-style design. He knew Davis socially and so he knew that the architect was still working to establish a following. When Underwood offered him the job, Davis admitted he knew nothing of the period, but accepted the commission and set about researching the proportion and principles of Georgian design.

“Drive through the Park Cities and you’ll see a lot of houses described as Georgian, but they’re just poor cousins of the original,” says Underwood, the owner/manager of Spanish Village Shopping Center. “The thing I appreciated about the house Dick did for me is that it was traditionally correct.”

Almost two years later, Underwood bought the lot next door and hired Davis to design a second home in the Georgian vernacular.

The back-to-back projects marked a turning point in Davis’ career, He had been like the art dealer who peddled Picasso when all anybody wanted was Monet.

“Once I did those houses for George, I got other (commissions for) traditional houses and I went, ’Oh look! You do a traditional house, you get more. You do a contemporary house and nobody will hire you.’ I could’ve continued to try to do things that nobody wanted and didn’t look like anything anybody had done before. But when you can have fun recombining traditional forms and have your client think they’re beautiful, what more could you want?”



Pilgrim’s Progress

ANOTHER BO PILGRIM, PERHAPS.

In what would be the second major turning point in Davis’ career, the chairman of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. hired him to design a sprawling French Renaissance-style chateau as the ’80s gasped its last breath.

At the initial consultation, Pilgrim told Davis: “I want you to be creative.” And then he spoke the six words of a patron saint: “We do not have a budget.”

The eight-bed room/nine-bath room house, a little longer than a football field, occupies 25 acres of a 52-acre lot in Pittsburg, Texas, a short drive from Pilgrim’s Pride headquarters. Even now, the house (dubbed Cluckingham Palace by the locals) is “the talk of Texas,” says Pilgrim.

But Davis is quick to point out that the majority of his work is made up of your average 4,000- to 6,000-square-foot North Dallashouse. The multimillion-dollar, Bo Pilgrim kinds of commissions “are few and far between,” he says, even if they do generate a lasting kind of buzz.

“People stop at the front of the road all the time, looking and taking pictures,” says Pilgrim. “They say it looks like nothing was left out, that it’s a dream house.

“We don’t think much about it,” he adds, “though we appreciate the Lord blessing us with it.”

Certainly, Richard Davis sees it that way.