Houses with semi-cylindrical...II: The Boehringer House

II. The Boehringer House (1912)

By request, the newly finished house, from which, using also the windows, you can identify the interior by reference to an exterior photo taken when it stood alone.  The infant oak tree had been planted only months earlier.  You can verify the glass in the door and front windows as well as the stained glass.  Also the lattice enclosure of the semi-enclosed NW back porch.

I already wrote about the house built for the Boehringer family when I identified it among the Pazadessus photos in the Digital Archive of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library as an "exceptional" one.  It is simply exceptionally well designed and well built.  The 1912 photos show its foundations being built when the Reilly-Reeves house was just finished in the winter to spring of 1912 and this house by late spring complete but not yet much landscaped and in the summer of 1912 evidently inhabited by the Boehringer family with two little girls.  If you just count the rooms, there are no more than eight (not counting baths and porches): it faces east, and on the south side has a living room, a dining room, a pantry, and a kitchen (the last less high-ceilinged but present already in the newly finished house); on the north side it has a real entry hall (which also accommodates the stairway), then with a protruding bay matching that of the dining room opposite it a room that century-old plans often label library or study, but, directly accessible from the dining room through the corridor-hall, you could call it a drawing room in any of the old meanings of that name.  I imagine that a WC/bath is behind that (it would correspond to the pantry), but from the exterior I see a semi-enclosed porch.  The semi-finished basement (which makes a fine wine cellar and serious workroom)  is accessible here, from an interior stairway.

This kind of a basic house plan, not always as large as here but often with more bays both laterally and in depth, is a standard one and, if I can manage it, I shall write about it later as such.  Suffice it to say here and now, from the front door you can look straight through to the back door.  This is still true of the Roumain house, too, additions notwithstanding, and a couple of generations earlier of the Fuqua house in Beauregard Town.  Since I am not an architect, I squirm at the idea of counting other people's rooms and arrangements.  Here an LSU family who understand their house and love it have most kindly let my camera in, too.  What delights me here, beyond its stately and gracious character and its very solid and refined workmanship (window frames and transoms to die for), is its fully informed use of a real Ionic order throughout and its matching upper and lower balustrades (both visible in the old photos, the upper one...in progress but preserved in pieces).  This architect knew that an Order is not limited to columns with all the right details; he also knew the entablatures to choose among, the pedestals for Ionic, and all the other moldings.  No thought was spared.  What is more, the designs of the windows, stained-glass included, are preserved.

From SE.  This one of the two original oaks survives.

The semi-hexagonal bay of the E windows of the living room.

Shortly after midday the beveling of the heavy glass door windows, in the latest style, reveal their prismatic character and also show the order on the porch and the balustrade and part of the Christian 

Science church directly opposite it.  The lens telescopes the width of Park Blvd, which then was Goldenrod Avenue.

 The through hall from a point between the Study at left and the dining room at right, so right in the middle of the house.  All the openings, with transoms above provide the openness (supposedly a modern idea but also more than a mere idea before AC or even efficient ceiling fans (unless you wanted your house to look like a barber shop); this house type is not only light but, no matter how you paint it, airy.  In fact, though the camera is good about handling color balance, the alternating casts of pale cyan and pale pink exaggerate colors.  Today no one knows whether the woodwork was dark or light in 1912, but magazines and catalogues do sometimes call for off-white paint (Greene and Greene did so sometimes) and I like to think of the Ionic character of all the main rooms with their exactly matching Ionic merely reduced in scale as carrying out the idea of marble columns,

because here all three of the showy rooms, Living, Dining, and Entry, use the Ionic (complete with entablatures and with pilasters like Ionic antae).

The ceiling medallion in the Living Room is the most elaborate of the four that I noticed, but in the same intelligent taste as all the rest.

Here in the semi-circular part of the porch, we see that the capitals larger and smaller do actually match each other.

It would have required video to complete continuously the design and space.  Here at left is the door into the hall looking E from the dining room, through the living room, to the front windows with which we began in the second image above.  This image is taken from the doorway to the pantry:

The pantry when new would have needed to be kept as cool as possible; in this one case the window in its S wall has been enlarged.  This image shows only a small part of the pantry, which by itself contains enough still life to keep an artist happy for weeks on end, as light shifts and usage gradually alters things.  There are some more views in the Album.  Here we see that the wonderful planks of the flooring are as fine as farther frontwards.

By present-day standards the kitchen may be small but it also boasts a genuine moveable table that won't wobble and, pulled out, could seat six.  And having a pantry helps a lot.

Now, back to the front, to imagine having just come in the front door.

This oval window is easily located on the N exterior.  It gives light to the landing where the stairs turn to enter the upper group of rooms (assumed to be bedrooms, which are doubtless, as they usually are, light and ample with window nooks for reading on the N and S, for example).

Not being a farmhouse, this one has no "mud room", but a couple of chairs to your right as you enter could take a book bag or a jacket or a place to sit to remove galoshes.  As for such impedimenta, the bench with a lifting seat would handle roller skates and the like.  Two steps perpendicular to that small utility space are marked by the heraldic stained glass and paneled to match the rest of the wall.

With the Living Room open at our left we have the through hall setting out to pass the Dining Room door.  One of the great virtues of this generous house, in my opinion, is having plenty of room for one of the owners' true sofas, strong and ample (not that I tested it!) and for an upright piano.  A real family needs lots of storage places, and this house actually needs all those provided.  The remaining width of the hall still is greater than the aisle of any First Class air liner; think rather of the coach cars of one of our great trains.  The paneling design is carried up the underside of the stairs.

This picture was taken for the nice door moldings and the open transom into the Dining Room, but a detail like that pendant knob (think of a newel post coming straight through and needing a terminal) delights me no end.

So here is a conspectus of the Entry Hall, integrating the Living Room's Ionic divider and showing the smaller and plainer ceiling medallion in the center.

Behind the piano, so to speak (on the other side of its wall), is the other middle room with its windows and center panel (its landscape-motif stained glass matching that in the corresponding place in the Dining Room).  Academic families don't need to hire Interior Decorators; in this house as in many others books and chests fill the bill, but the owners also have their own taste and must take real pleasure in their house. 

As for locating things, the neighboring lots do cramp this one, so the image is askew, but on the underside of the eaves of the semi-circular part of the porch you can see where part of the balustrade is fastened, then the heraldic stained glass on the lower landing and, farther right, the oval stained glass on the upper landing.  Subtracting the neighbor's garden gate, you discern the semi-hexagonal bay of the Study and, above it rectangular shape of the upper-storey group of windows.

At the foot of the front steps, part of the very solid dark red foundation bricks laid in 1912 are visible and the ample space for bench, table, and swing in the porch itself.

Though most Baton Rouge houses do not have real basements, the rear, west, part of the Boehringer house does have one, deep enough to stand in comfortably.  This was taken, as I recall, just to the north of the kitchen.

This nice house in the 600 block of Napoleon St. in the southern half of Beauregard Town has a wrap-around porch and gables over the centers of the front and the sides, but it is not interested in classical references.  Someone, fairly recently, has restored this one.  It looks either more rustic or earlier to me.  

Dated "c. 1910" in the register for Drehr Place, this really handsome house (also minus its balustrades), with its "colossal" Ionic order and Palladian-arched windows, probably has a plan rather like that of the Boehringer house.  I'd love to get inside to see its front rooms.  It was moved to the 2200 block of Government Street next to the one-time Methodist church, now being restored, when it had to vacate its original site downtown.  Anyone want to help me to identify it?  I can't imagine anything better to live in than one of these big, square houses; the Boehringer one is merely, for my taste, an uncommonly lovely one.

A whole album of details of the Boehringer house is in my Picasa albums. 

https://picasaweb.google.com/102498681030579488308/June272013

And, for additional exterior views, photos nos. 226–233 in the album:

https://picasaweb.google.com/102498681030579488308/GDNeighborhood2013STUDY

Houses with semi-cylindrical foundations for wrap-around porches-I

I. The Roumain House at 201 St. Charles Street

This house must date to about the time of Mr. Roumain's 6-story skyscraper on 3rd Street.  Its more than semi-cylindrical porch on its NW corner  has marble hexagonal tiles (and the steps are marble, just as almost all the steps to houses in Athens, Greece are, though they are exceptional here), but the columns, to my surprise, are built of wood.  The foundations are of that lovely dark red brick, just like the 1912 foundations of the Boehringer house and the Reiley-Reeves house.

The red tile roof also is noteworthy, but more remarkable is the use of custom-curved glass  for the round corner (not a round porch here) of the room that begins just behind the column at right.  These columns are more or less Tuscan Doric with adorning motifs added (as also wherever space allows on the balustrade above and on the face of the upper story.

The front doors are better than stained glass; they are heavily leaded glass in fine hardwood frames.  In this photo you can see, also, the marble tiling of the whole porch floor.

The fireplace in the small front room, perfectly preserved and with its imported marble hearth intact, though the  elaborately framed mirror (reflecting an oriental rug) has been removed and all of the period furniture.  (Note also the recent decision to make the inner frame pale; when a fireplace was used for fire with wood or coal, the black finish on the metal fire box would be functional).

Suitably, the young couple's Going Away picture, so close to the front door, was taken in front of this fireplace; you see the identical veining in the marble hearth.  The photos are more than a half century apart.  Not only the hearth is unaffected by time: the fake logs in the gas fire also are identically the same.  Everything suggests that the YWCA  occupancy of the house was on condition of good care.  From a built-in bench (is the foyer a waiting room?) one turns to go up a couple of steps to a first landing.

The rest of the stairway to the upper rooms (not accessible and seemingly not used)  shows us the Ionic capitals  (shiny and dark in 1954) and the young Mrs. Kidd tossing her bouquet to the bridesmaids.  The older persons in the background seem to be standing just inside the leaded glass front door.

The stairs lead up to undamaged, high quality stained glass  (for details, see the Album), and  also you see  both of the Ionic capitals that do duty to dignify the posts.  One is shown below.

None of the woodwork seems to have been scuffed up (though one assumes that recently it has been cleaned and oiled).  The rosettes and pendant palmettes  have nothing to do with an Ionic order and may have been applied rather than carved in the wood (?).

Today you can see that these capitals, if not gessoed wood, must be plaster.   The mixture of expensive materials and less expensive work is one of the interesting things about this house.  I have failed to find a thesis or an article on this house (and perhaps its comparison with Mayor Irvine's house that, less than a decade old (built in 1904-5), which was destroyed by the 1912 Bayou Sara flood).   The house that Mayor Irvine built to replace it was not so splendid and did not have a semi-cylindrical porch element.
But round-foundation wrap-around porches (which I think must be truncated turrets, as Mayor Irvine's certainly was turreted) are not the whole story of style.

Just outside Beauregard Town, but facing north on Government St., and just east of WAFB-TV, 982 Government Street, given over to divorce lawyers, has a little dormer for air in the attic and very elaborated Craftwman-like brackets, quite comparable with those on the Roumain House up at 201 St. Charles.  I strongly suspect that it has been rescued from the attempt at a mall downtown and brought here, where it lords it over its neighbors.  To me, it has "c. 1912" (or so) written all over it and, very substantial but not adorned with marbles, it could easily be by the same (unknown) architect as the Roumain House.
*****

The satellite view of the Romain house in Google Earth (zoom to max) is very surprising.  It shows a building quite unlike the squarish houses with a bay of windows at each side with, or without, wrap-around porches.
The Romain House is quite unlike any other that I know, and, now that I know that the YWCA already had it in 1954, there is no reason why it should not be quite alike in 2013 and 1954.  The question, therefore, is whether it ever was occupied by a family, domestically. or what it looked like inside then.  Friends of my friend, jbk, whose parents appear above, know ladies who went to teas there, at the YWCA, over the years.  I think of the Women's City Club in Berkeley...

The Farmhouse is a Genre, Greek Revival a Style

See at end of this post.  This is a 1960s photo of Gov. Fuqua's house at 301 Napoleon Street.  A new photo is at the head of my post here for May 1, 2013.    This photo is in the Baton Rouge collection of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, Ernest Gueymard Coll., ID Gue089. 

 An Inquiry into Greek Revival in houses down the River Road

I dedicate this post to Wood Grigsby, one of my oldest friends and a native to Southern LaFourche parish, for introducing me to these houses, now nearly 30 years ago, so that some of the Kodachrome shows deterioration, but we took views for the architecture, not for publicity.  I dedicate it also to an even older friend, Pershing Jung, a friend for 60 years now, who in 1990 hunted down a copy of J. Frazer Snith's White Pillars (1941) and sent it to me.
I also must thank J. Michael Desmond, John Sykes, H. Parrott Bacot, George Weaver, and Ervin Dunham for all sorts of help, though none of them knew what I intended to do here!

Another view of the house that Wood Grigsby was personally interested in.

Farther south, in St. Charles Parish as Wood recalls, we saw a much larger Creole farmhouse, yet formally like the one above; its sides are gabled, it is a single story, and it may have a dog-trot hall down the center.  One of the secondary houses at Madewood is quite similar to this one.

That brings us to the wonderful house, Madewood itself, at any rate the one that most impressed me on the day we saw half a dozen.  It is the work of Henry Howard (1818—1884), his earliest known work, since the acquisitions of Thomas Pugh himself date it in the 1840s.  Now, I wouldn't call Henry Howard "forgotten", though J. Frazer Smith, perceptive architect that he was, providing perhaps the best description and appreciation of Madewood, while he knows all the history, does not mention the architect, and the Wikipedia has no biographical entry for Howard.  It is earlier than Woodlawn (demolishd), much earlier than his Belle Grove (burned in 1952 but not before Clarence Laughlin photographed it), while Nottoway (1859) is Italianate rather than Greek Revival in style.  Plainly, Howard's style reveals his early training at the Mechanics Institute in Cork, where he was born, and his being a builder's son.  And he designed Madewood while still in his twenties.

(See Ferguson, John C. "Henry Howard."  In KnowLA, Encyclopedia of Louisiana.  Ed., David Johnson, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 29 Jul. 2011.  Web. 23 May 2013.  The National Park Service article on Madewood itself is also excellent)

The above photographs show that Madewood is truly Greek Revival of a distinctively intense kind (comparison with Spiro Kostov, A History of Architecture, OUP, 1985, fig. 22.21a suggests that the young Howard may even have doted on Robert Adam's masterpieces).  It is unlike Louisiana plantation houses, which usually have colonnades on all four sides, a type well established by Robert Adam's own generation in the mid-18th century (see Parlange in Pointe Coupee parish, though built by a Frenchman: Kostov, fig. 24.5a).  Whatever the date of Rienzi Plantation, down by Thibodaux, with its lovely oak trees, or Vacherie's "Oak Alley" (which they called beau séjour), Kostov, fig. 24.27—two other family houses at Vacherie are St. Joseph's and Laura), Rienzi, too, has columns on all four sides.  Yet it is hardly that Madewood is any less prestigious a plantation house than they are.  It simply unites, very deftly, exceptional Greek Revival with the traditional Creole form.

Howard's urban designs in New Orleans are different, so I won't discuss them here.

Pure Greek Revival in Baton Rouge and Marietta Georgia

After heading a general essay with Governor Fuqua's house at 301 Napoleon Street in Beauregard Town, I found one house (and still only one) that is exactly like it, Colonel Brumby's of 1851 in Marietta, GA.  It is tucked away in the plates of the McAlesters' Field Guide, looking quite unlike the other Greek Revival houses there.

The Marietta house (or hall, as they call it), is available on line in an article in MariettaPatch and on several other promotional pages.  Its emphasis on geometrical clarity and on vertical alignment are just like Governor Fuqua's house, despite being Doric (Greek Doric without any column bases, too).  Now, as Erv Dunham pointed out to me, the Fuqua house does not appear on the Sanborn property-insurance maps for 1911 and earlier; they show a house of a very different shape.  On the 1916 map a house rendered as a square with six columns facing Napoleon Street and built close to the northern property line does appear and, evidently, is the Fuqua house still there today.  Now Henry Fuqua's Hardware Company has been in business since 1883.  Then, from 1916 he was also Warden of Angola Prison, where he seems to have made it the rather exceptional institution that it is even now.  He was governor, though an important and estimable one, only for the last two years of his life.  For more, see the Wikipedia, s.v., Henry L. Fuqua and references listed there.  But it is the house that concerns me here.  Erv Dunham suggests that it must have been moved to its present site, as many were.  John Sykes confirms the practice of moving houses, when everything that went into a house made it more economical than the present habit of demolition and rebuilding, and not least in Baton Rouge.  As to the date of the Fuqua house, its very striking resemblance to Colonel Brumby's of 1851 lends credence to what Gov. Fuqua's widow told John Sykes in 1954, that the house was then already a century old.  That is not a document,  of course, and I have seen it dated c. 1835.  

What, finally, is the chance that when Henry Howard went to Georgia he left his mark there, even though during the War he was working for the Confederate war effort?  

Fact is, that thinking of our visiting the River Road plantations in the early 1980s (probably 1983 or 1984), I kept thinking of seeing such pediments there.  When I went to my scanned files I found that indeed it was Madewood that had made me like the Governor's house at sight.

Of course, building in wood the houses in Marietta and Baton Rouge are lighter (and smaller, too).

What makes Greek Revival style so difficult is their working from those wonderful big books, from Thomas Jefferson's using the actually tiny Temple of Athena Nike on the SW bastion of the Athens Acropolis (or was it the not much larger Maison Carrée at Nîmes?), all laid out for him in beautiful engravings, for the Virginia Capitol, just as Robert Adam had used earlier folios of Rome and Pompeii.  One would think that Henry Howard was steeped even as a boy in such books.  His formation is in fact, I think, more Jeffersonian than of Latrobe's kind.  But I can't find pictures of houses by Latrobe.  

I forget who it was who pointed out that the history of architecture is strongly conditioned by the cost of important buildings and building projects and their involving great private wealth when they didn't in fact involve public monies.

So I have spent a lot of time speculating and trying to ground speculation in whatever else I could find. For example: what was going on in Baton Rouge just before war broke out in Europe?  Why are so many things datable c. 1912: the three most prestigious houses in Roseland Terrace (for which we have Mr. Cazadessous' photographs), the eight-story skyscrapter of Mr. Roumain on 3rd Street and his very opulent house at 201 St. Charles in Beauregard Town?  Has it anything to do with the Bayou Sara flood at St. Francisville in 1912?  Could a house be moved the 25 miles, more or less, to Baton Rouge from the Felicianas?  Well, perhaps that's too fanciful.  Was Henry Fuqua's Hardware Company profitable enough (but in 1912 he was 47, the prime of life) to enable him to move such a house from wherever it had been?

A fine bungalow of 1922 in Drehr Place

On the SW corner of Drehr and Wisteria

A bungalow is a genre, not a style

The true bungalows (by "true" meaning the ones that like those in Alexandria, VA, are called California bungalows) built when the opening of Drehr Place was still recent are uncommonly fine.  This one has an L porch at south and a nicely designed porte cochère north that are both continuous with the broad porch and both original (only an addition at the back, which reaches the NS utilities alley, is a later addition).   Its bungalow design governs all sides, not just that facing the street, bearing out what the Wikipedia article, s.v. Bungalow, says of the type (as of the Prairie House), that it does demand a lot much larger than the interior spaces of the house require, so that "Chicago bungalows" have bedrooms above in order to be crammed onto 40-foot lots (or even narrower).  Its spreading plan is true to its Bengali origin, and it is a perfect type for semi-tropical Louisiana.  After three months study, I realize that the Wikipedia article is actually the very best one.  It recognizes that a 'bungalow' is a genre, not a style, whether for its style it resorts to Craftsman brackets, or chooses to buy some "Colonial" Tuscan columns to give it perhaps a less suburban character; in adobe territory, it may even be heavily stuccoed with some "mission" traits.  On this corner lot, besides space for a garden, it has as large a footprint as most of the taller corner-lot houses in our Garden District.  So far, I haven't found another such "four-sided" bungalow here, though the blue-painted one facing it comes close.

Noteworthy is the very low gable (no need to shed snow here), which permits a full set of five sturdy brackets: permits, because they all can be anchored top and bottom, from the gable cap at the top to the center of the 3 windows, aligned with the center porch pillar.  All three pillars have brick pedestals splayed at the bottom.

The splayed profile of the brick chimney's base repeats that of the righthand porch pedestal.  The owners of this house (who, of course, as such possess the data given every time they are sent a property-tax assessment) informed me that the house was built in 1922.

A whole album of this house, 608 Drehr, is provided.

Two blocks to the east, at 2332 Wisteria is the Sanders house, already presented in the blog post of March 15.  Here the original parts of the house date from 1921.  Its splayed brick pedestals and general proportions are similar, though, besides the square brackets, emphasizing their sturdiness, its pillars (and their pi motif) are very short and the brick pedestals are taller, twice as tall as the pillars.

Blocks away, two lots south of the Reiley-Reeves house on Park Boulevard where we found the earliest Craftsman elements in Roseland Terrace, we noticed 840 Park Blvd nearly a twin to the Sanders house, with the same brick parts and splayed bases (as well as square brackets and short pillars) certainly date its design (and probably construction) also c. 1921.  I take these, tentatively, as the earliest Garden District bungalows, if the similarity of 840 Park to 2332 Wisteria is not partly due to restoration...  Or is it only the same brand of paint?

The house I added as "A-prime" at 2147 Oleander Street (see post of 10 February) combines the three-window vent in the gable with brackets that look like many early-1920s ones, but triangular (it is the square ones that as brackets are exceptional), but its roof is a little steeper and so deeper, so only three brackets are logical; the intermediate ones would not reach.  In any case, this house is a good example of assorted accoutrements.  

In its very low proportions and wide eaves, on the other hand, it is the picket-fenced house, no. 603, on the NE corner of Drehr and Wisteria, once grey, now blue (already posted in one photo on Mar. 15), directly opposite the the pale terre verte bungalow heading this post, that most truly resembles our 608 Drehr, though the blue house has neither an L shaped porch nor a porte cochère.  It is so truly a bungalow, notwithstanding.

By the way, turning the corner onto Wisteria, you see something original doubtless to many but usually enclosed now (for a kitchen toilet and shower), an open back porch.  Actually, I took the picture because I thought that Richard Diebenkorn would like to look at its composition and think about it.

Another bungalow, that same brand of blue paint (!), is up on Government Street, also less than a block away.  This has the same low, broad proportions and, this time, with an ample L porch.  I doubt that it ever had brackets.  No need to have any.  But it has the triple-window vents in the low gable.

Finally, another repetition, but here in proper context.  Again, this house is not "in an Order" or "in Neo-Colonial 'style'", merely by using pillars with capitals.  Sitting right next to the blue one, you could build it on pretty much the same foundations and would have chosen  its suitability to our climate and lifestyle for the same reasons.  I guess that both of these houses are from the early 1920s, too.

********

Back in the years when I taught survey courses, I made the class memorize, "A capital does not an Order make" (so that when, on a test, I asked them to draw one of the orders they would know that I meant the total design system, or syntax, of Doric, say, or Ionic.  I never ventured asking them to draw Corinthian).

To make the point, I took a slide of a brick-faced block with white trim and some readymade columns disguising its front and said that jerrybuilt branches of local banks only advertise the respectability of our Nation's Founders, and a well operated branch in a cinderblock garage might well be equally honest.

By the way, let me add that there are many various bungalows in both Roseland Terrace and Drehr Place that are all or mostly original that I have not discussed.  An example is 632 Drehr Street, which has unique brackets (but whether 'Victorian' or Japanese I do not know) in combination with columns, though it is not a very large house.  However, I know that its owners are far better qualified to write it up than I am, and here I am more concerned with quasi-Aristotelian 'categories', such as 'style' and 'Order' and 'genre' than with trying to account fully for every single house.