by David Cathers
When they began house hunting in the mid-1970s, the McWilliamses were determined if at all possible to buy a Myron Hunt house. They had learned of this architect, and come to admire his work, because friends of theirs lived contentedly in a Hunt-designed home, which, with perhaps more sentiment than historical accuracy, those friends referred to as “a comfortable Victorian.”
Jim and Mary McWilliams found two of Hunt’s Evanston houses to choose from. As things turned out, the one they ended up buying was not their first choice, it was their second. But the choice they made, though difficult at the time, was to have a much more beneficial effect on their lives than they could at first have anticipated.
Although Hunt never achieved great national acclaim, his buildings are rightly admired in the Chicago area, where he lived and worked from 1896 to 1903, and in California, where he spent the remainder of his career. In Chicago he devoted himself primarily to domestic architecture, flexibly designing a varied group of suburban homes to suit the tastes of individual clients. In general, however, his houses were simple, unpretentious, affordable structures that reflected the influence of Shingle Style architecture.
Hunt’s houses also shared Prairie School traits: their elevations emphasized the horizontal line, their exteriors were mostly composed of stone and naturally finished wood, and they had interiors that were notable for their open planning, with one space flowing easily into the next. Hunt and Frank Lloyd Wright were in fact close friends, and in the late 1890s they shared studio space in downtown Chicago in the 11-story office tower/theater building Steinway Hall with several other forward-looking young architects of their generation. And, like Wright, in 1897 Hunt was a charter member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society.
But Hunt’s trademark talent was uniquely his own: his plans allowed for the maximum amount of usable space in houses that had to fit within the typically restricted boundaries of suburban building plots. In large part, it was because his houses were so pleasingly functional that he was kept busy with commissions during his years in Chicago. Before moving to California, he designed at least 39 buildings in Evanston alone, including a home for himself and his family. Myron Hunt’s houses are much coveted and rarely come onto the market, because, as Jim McWilliams says, “they are so livable.”
The house the McWilliamses live in was built in 1898, and Hunt must have considered it one of his best because he exhibited a rendering of it in the 1899 Chicago Architectural Club exhibition. He designed the house for a client named Harley N. Higginbottam, who was, among other things, a partner of the department store mogul Marshall Field. Higginbottam built this house not for himself but as a rental property; the first tenant was another department store grandee, Samuel Carson of Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company. Carson’s partner Pirie lived just up the street, also in a Myron Hunt house.
The McWilliamses bought their house in 1976, and gradually restored it over a period of about 15 years. Furnishing it didn’t take quite that long. Although Mary’s taste ran more toward the Colonial Revival style, the first piece of furniture she bought for their new home was a $150 Mission oak rocking chair. It’s still in their living room. “I’m not sure why,” she said to Jim at the time, “but this rocker fits in this house.” Shortly thereafter, as their knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement grew, they began collecting early-20th-century furniture, pottery, metalwork and textiles.
Although the couple’s Stickley furniture collection is not extensive, it is particularly choice. Their rectangular, circa-1910 dining table, with boldly expressed tenon-and-key joints at both ends of its massive medial stretcher, is one of the few exciting new designs that emerged from Stickley’s factory during the late phase of his Arts and Crafts furniture making. The chairs around the table are “H-back” chairs, so named because their wide back slats have cutouts at the top and bottom and resemble a capital H. They, too, are from the late period — first appearing in the firm’s 1910 catalog — but Jim McWilliams considers them to be “probably Stickley’s cleanest designs.” The McWilliamses didn’t choose them, however, simply because they are handsome.
As Jim explains, “they are the narrowest chairs Stickley made, and we can squeeze more of them around a table than would be possible with the earlier, more massive chairs.”
The other most noteworthy Stickley pieces in this collection come from Stickley’s early period. The couple’s 1901 double-door bookcase, with its Gothic-inspired curves, molded edges and crisply beveled top, is a great rarity. Stickley used such refined decorative touches sparingly and to great effect in 1900 and 1901, but then, as his ideas about furniture design changed, he turned away from this kind of subtle detailing. The McWilliamses’ 1902 double-door china cabinet, a massive piece with an absolutely straight-lined profile, is equally rare, and a perfect representative of how Stickley’s furniture shifted, in just one year, from artful curves to bold geometry. They also own an extremely rare 1902 Stickley fall-front desk that has a fascinating history: it once belonged to the silent movie star Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and they were able to buy it years ago, when the contents of his opulent Rhode Island estate came up for auction.
What truly sets the bookcase and china cabinet apart from much of the Stickley furniture seen today is their extraordinary condition. Both of these 100-year-old pieces of furniture retain their original rich, dark, glowing finishes. Stickley is generally praised today for the clean lines, good proportions and meticulous construction of his furniture, but he was also a master colorist. He gave his cabinet woods complex and subtle hues: gray-brown, green-brown and a soft, matte near-black. Early Stickley pieces with their color so intact are, to say the least, very hard to find.
Besides Stickley furniture, the pair seek Arts and Crafts objects with a local flavor. Their Stickley china cabinet, for instance, houses a dazzling collection of silver and aluminum pieces from the Cellini Shop, a small Evanston firm that made hand-wrought flatware, hollowware and jewelry beginning in 1914. Jim and Mary also collect Teco pottery — sought after today for its classic architect-designed shapes and silken matte green glazes — also made near Chicago. And, as the accompanying photographs show, this pottery harmonizes not only with Gustav Stickley’s furniture, but also with the interior detailing of Myron Hunt’s architecture.
The ceramics firm that made Teco also produced lamps, and today Teco lamps are highly prized by the few collectors fortunate enough to own them. The McWilliamses’ Teco lamp is an unusually successful example, and retains its original leaded-glass shade designed by Orlando Giannini and made by his partner Fritz Hilgart. Although Giannini created some designs of Teco pottery, he and Hilgart are best remembered today for the superb art glass they supplied for Frank Lloyd Wright’s early, precedent-setting Prairie houses.good proportions and meticulous construction of his furniture, but he was also a master colorist. He gave his cabinet woods complex and subtle hues: gray-brown, green-brown and a soft, matte near-black. Early Stickley pieces with their color so intact are, to say the least, very hard to find.
Besides Stickley furniture, the pair seek Arts and Crafts objects with a local flavor. Their Stickley china cabinet, for instance, houses a dazzling collection of silver and aluminum pieces from the Cellini Shop, a small Evanston firm that made hand-wrought flatware, hollowware and jewelry beginning in 1914. Jim and Mary also collect Teco pottery — sought after today for its classic architect-designed shapes and silken matte green glazes — also made near Chicago. And, as the accompanying photographs show, this pottery harmonizes not only with Gustav Stickley’s furniture, but also with the interior detailing of Myron Hunt’s architecture.
The ceramics firm that made Teco also produced lamps, and today Teco lamps are highly prized by the few collectors fortunate enough to own them. The McWilliamses’ Teco lamp is an unusually successful example, and retains its original leaded-glass shade designed by Orlando Giannini and made by his partner Fritz Hilgart. Although Giannini created some designs of Teco pottery, he and Hilgart are best remembered today for the superb art glass they supplied for Frank Lloyd Wright’s early, precedent-setting Prairie houses.
In addition to its impressive Arts and Crafts collection, the McWilliams house is home to perhaps the most important Jules Guerin collection in existence. Guerin (1866-1946) is not as widely known today as he deserves to be, but in the late-19th and early-20th centuries he was one of the era’s most successful architectural delineators and magazine illustrators.
He was also a muralist, a painter equally proficient in watercolors and oils, and a stage designer. As a creator of architectural renderings he ranks as one of the finest of his era; Marion Mahony, best-known for her exquisite presentation drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, and Harvey Ellis, who drew and designed houses, furniture and textiles for Gustav Stickley in 1903, may be counted among Guerin’s peers.
It was as an illustrator, however, that Guerin earned his greatest acclaim. Through his friendship with the hugely popular artist Maxfield Parrish, he began providing illustrations to Century magazine at the turn of the 20th century, and during the following two decades created illustrations as well for Harper’s, Scrib-ner’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. His illustrations for “The Chateaux of Touraine,” published in 1904 as a series of articles in Century, and then gathered together in a book, brought Guerin his first real public attention.
This success led to other magazine series that were also made into books, including Egypt and Its Monuments and The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople.
Guerin knew how to make his paintings compelling: he exaggerated perspective for dramatic effect, approached his subjects from an unexpected point of view and drenched his scenes in glowing colors. “The key to Guerin,” says Jim McWilliams, “is his use of color. He was very sensitive to natural colors.” Guerin traveled widely, often painting out of doors and capturing in watercolor the distinctive hues of each place he visited. His Egyptian scenes, for instance, are crisp and bright in the hot, dry desert air, and, in contrast, the ancient buildings he painted in Venice shimmer in a faint blue atmospheric haze. Guerin created vivid, romanticized images of far-away settings, and American magazine readers, leafing through the pages in the familiar comforts of their own homes, were captivated by the exoticism of his work. He also painted stirring vistas of historic buildings that are icons of the American landscape: Independence Hall, the Smithsonian Institution, the Capitol Building and the White House.
The McWilliamses discovered Guerin in the late 1970s. They happened on two or three of his prints at a local house sale, liked the pictures immediately, and bought them for a few dollars each. Then a friend found three original Guerin paintings set out on a porch at another Evanston house sale, and they bought them as well. With that purchase they were transformed, no longer casual buyers but determined collectors. Although some of the paintings they’ve bought over the years came from auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, most were ferreted out from much more obscure sources. The fact that they were found at all is testament to Jim and Mary’s shared love of this work and to their persistence and ingenuity.
Although the McWilliamses are sophisticated and discriminating collectors, they cannot be considered Arts and Crafts purists. They live with Arts and Crafts furniture, but it is leavened with such touches as the zany 1950s folk art floor lamp that stands next to a Limbert Morris chair in the middle of their living room. Their Guerin artwork is of the period, but they also own a modern reproduction “Winged Victory” statuette.
A classical object such as this may seem out of place in this environment, but in fact it is not at all unusual to see such statuary in period photographs of Arts and Crafts-era houses. Viewed from the outside, the McWilliams home would not strike anyone as an Arts and Crafts house, and yet the natural interior woodwork, living room inglenook and open downstairs floor plan all fall within the movement’s tradition.
This house and collection provide convincing evidence that the phrase “Arts and Crafts” can accommodate much more variety than is often thought today.
When Mary and Jim first started looking for a Myron Hunt house, they met the owner of the house in Evanston that Hunt had designed for himself and his family in 1896. It had hipped roofs, deep shadow-casting eaves, exterior walls sheathed in wooden shingles and diamond-paned windows evocative of a charming English cottage.
In 1905, a writer in House Beautiful had written that “it is constructed on straight lines, and produces almost a Japanese effect in its simplicity.” The McWilliamses could not help but fall in love with this house. It was, amazingly, for sale at that time, but the price was very steep, and the house needed substantial amounts of repair and restoration. They decided not to stretch to buy it, and they’ve never regretted that decision. Opting for a more modest mortgage freed them to collect the Stickley furniture, Teco pottery, early-20th-century textiles, and Guerin prints and paintings that have come to mean so much to them.
Over years of collecting they’ve met other people who are equally passionate about the Arts and Crafts movement and have become their friends. “In many ways,” says Jim, “the people are more important than the objects. Today we can travel to just about any part of the U.S. and meet with friends who share our interests.” The McWilliamses are drawn strongly to Arts and Crafts architecture, furniture and art, but their kinship with an extended, like-minded community matters just as much. The choice they made, so long ago, has proved to be the right one.
David Cathers last wrote about the Pearsons’ Frank Lloyd Wright home and their furniture and pottery collection in Issue No. 36. He is the author of Furniture of the American Art and Crafts Movement and Stickley Style: Arts and Crafts Homes in the Craftsman Tradition.
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