Preservation, restoration and heritage are the major themes of the newest issue of American Bungalow. For those who aren’t subscribers or haven’t yet picked up a copy from their favorite dealer or newsstand, here’s a preview.
The story of Phoenix’s historic Orpheum Theatre—which opened in January 1929, skirted demolition in the 1980s and was restored to its original splendor in the mid-1990s—follows the arc of Phoenix’s history through nearly eight decades, from the glory days of the city’s boom years in the twenties, through the Great Depression, to Post–WW II suburban growth and urban abandonment, and finally to the renaissance of a vibrant downtown core over the past decade.
“Oh, You’ll Miss Me, Honey: When Phoenix Changed Its Mind and Saved the Orpheum,” says that the restoration, completed in 1994, is not just a monument to the age of vaudeville but also “a small miracle of historic preservation accomplished through an episode of cultural, civic and political imagination.” The story is online here, but to see how Alexander Vertikoff’s photos capture the restoration in all its extravagant, over-the-top glory, you’ll have to pick up the magazine; the Web just can’t do justice to this grand theater palace.
“Light, River, Rock, Tree: Phantom Ranch’s Elemental Music” is a stunning portrait of Mary Jane Colter’s Phantom Ranch, a rustic cabin resort on the floor of the Grand Canyon. The article is the first in a new series on the melding of European-American Arts and Crafts, Spanish Missionary and Native-American Indian cultures that took place in the American Southwest in the decades bridging the 1880s and the 1920s, giving rise to the “Southwest style.”
Drawing heavily on Native American and Spanish Mission arts, crafts and building designs, the Southwest style’s emergence coincided with the bungalow era, and Southwest artifacts and furnishings soon became the decor of choice for bungalow living.
Craftsman-era gems
Three residential gems from the Craftsman era highlight regional variations in early-20th-century design. One, in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Portland, Ore., has simply been well treated and carefully preserved. The other two, in Kansas City, Mo., and San Diego, Calif., have been meticulously restored—in K.C. over 15 years and in San Diego over 40.
“If you don’t look too closely,” writes the author of the Portland story, “the 1915 home, with its high square center flanked on both sides by lower, projecting front blocks, looks as though it could have been built around 1955—either that, or perhaps centuries ago, in Moorish Spain. The abundance of leaded and stained glass gives it away, though, as do the elaborate interior trim and a built-in buffet made to rival the most well-appointed Arts and Crafts homes.
“Nancy and Victor Rhodes, who bought the house as a starter home in 1973, have now settled into it as their place of retirement. And over the three and a half decades they’ve lived there, they’ve come not just to love it but to know it, patiently piecing together its history.”
In Kansas City, the popular local TV news reporter Stan Carmack had begun restoring a historic 1910 Hyde Park limestone Craftsman foursquare when he owned it briefly in the 1970s. In 1994, Jae McKeown and Robin Rusconi bought it and began the work of completing the restoration. Their meticulous craftsmanship and discerning taste in period furnishings have given the century-old parkside home a new lease on life that would make its architect, the prolific Clarence Erasmus Shepard, proud.
And in San Diego, when Carolyn and Tom Owen-Towle bought a gracefully proportioned but somewhat faded Craftsman home in the city’s historic Bankers Hill neighborhood in 1978, they thought colorful paint and great-looking rugs were all it would take to bring it back to life. But the couple, then new co-ministers (and now ministers emeriti) at San Diego’s First Unitarian Universalist Church, asked local architectural historian and preservationist Rurik Kallis to restore a damaged window.
Kallis complied, then suggested restoring the window seat beneath it … and then the entire room. When they saw the result, they realized they had begun a journey of restoration they would have to complete, no matter how long it took. “We felt a responsibility—almost a calling, really—to reclaim that beauty,” Carolyn says. Forty years later, they’ve brought it all back home. And because Carolyn is the daughter of the famed California artist, arts educator and curator Millard Owen Sheets, the stately yet festive home today houses a substantial collection of Sheets’s own luminous paintings and of the world art he and Carolyn’s mother collected during their decades of travel abroad.
Finally, in this issue’s “From Our Friends” essay, San Antonio architect J. Douglas Lipscomb, AIA, argues that the kind of design excellence Vitruvius advocated during the reign of Augustus Caesar sometime before 27 B.C.—and that is still the foundation of successful and healthy communities today—can be found in our modest American bungalows, which have proved durable, adaptable and filled with delight.
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