Isabella Court

Designed by William D. Bordeaux in 1928, Isabella Court is a noteworthy adaptation of the Spanish Colonial Revival Style for commercial and residential purposes. Spanish Colonial Revival was a popular romantic style during the 1920s and 1930s throughout the west and southwest. Isabella Court is a successful reminder of the once chic commercial and residential strip that connected downtown Houston to the burgeoning cultural center further south near Hermann Park and Rice University. It meets Criterion C in the area of Architecture as an excellent and rare surviving Houston example of a multi-use Spanish Colonial Revival style building at a local level of significance.

The Spanish Colonial Revival and its more modest antecedent, the Mission Revival, were originally developed in California but passed into widespread use as a regional style following Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue's incorporation of Spanish elements in the design of the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. During the 1920s the Spanish Colonial Revival style dominated much of the public, commercial, and domestic architecture of the American Southwest.

Texas, although possessing a handful of significant 18th-century Spanish Colonial buildings, did not adopt the Spanish Colonial Revival as a historically authentic regional expression. Rather, the Southern California interpretation of the Spanish Colonial proved to be most popular in Texas as it was throughout the rest of the country. Houston became much disposed to the domestic and commercial possibilities of the style during the 1920s. Nowhere in Houston was Spanish Colonial Revival displayed more than the South Main strip, a 2 1/2 mile linear corridor linking the Central Business District and the new suburban areas developing around Hermann Park and the Rice Institute (now Rice University) campus.

The strip began at the southern edge of the downtown retail district where the newest, tallest office buildings and hotels were being constructed, and progressed through a 20-block-long neighborhood of 19th-century mansions. South of Elgin Avenue, the boulevard entered a zone of more intensive commercial and institutional development which continued south to Hermann Park. Smart specialty shops, imposing new churches, deluxe apartment hotels, and as impressive an array of cultural institutions as Houston could then muster were erected along the vital link. Unfortunately, period photographs of the corridor have not been found.

The popularity of the Spanish Colonial Revival in Houston during the 1920s was not confined to the Main Street strip. The "craft district", comprising a group of printing plants on Buffalo Drive (now Allen Parkway) between Waugh and Dunlavy, adopted Spanish-influenced styling, as did a number of community centers and churches built along Almeda Road in the late 1920s. A diluted Spanish Renaissance was favored along "Auto Row", a collection of automobile agencies on the southern periphery of downtown Houston. The Houston Public Library, built in 1926, was of Spanish Renaissance styling, prompting the City Planning Commission in 1927 to propose that the entire Civic Center be developed in the style.

Most of the city's country clubs built in the 1920s were of Spanish-influenced design, and the style was popular as well for all classes of domestic architecture. The entire subdivision of Meadowbrook sought to recreate the romance of Old Spain alongside the Interurban tracks for householders of modest means by use of the Spanish Colonial Revival style. However, the city's most accomplished Spanish Colonial Revival houses were built to accommodate a more affluent clientele. The Spanish-influenced style was employed by such prominent architects as Charles W. Oliver, Harrie T. Lindeberg, Ralph Adams Cram, John Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, Joseph Finger, and William Ward Watkin in Broadacres, Shadyside and River Oaks.

Following the Great Depression, the Spanish Colonial Revival fell into disuse as historicist architecture in general was superseded by the Moderne for commercial construction. As with other 1920s period styles, the Spanish Colonial Revival was considered too exotic for the more restrained, less nostalgic tastes of the succeeding decade.

The extensive use of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture along the commercial reach of South Main Street between Elgin Avenue and Richmond Road during the 1920s grew from efforts of merchants to invest in the area with a distinctive "public" identity capable of identification from a moving car and congruent with the suburban character of the South End. The romantically aesthetic Spanish Colonial Revival style proved to be an apt scenographic device for transmitting the imagery of urbanism under exurban conditions.

The person most responsible for providing South Main with the imagery of the Spanish Colonial Revival Style was the Houston businessman, Pierre L. Michael. Michael's firm, the Houston Poster Advertising Company, constructed an office and workshop building at the corner of South Main and Berry Street which combined details of Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architecture with the more prosaic accouterments of industrial construction such as steel-sash windows. Three years later, at South Main and Truxillo Avenue, Michael erected the Ironcraft Studio, a 2-story commercial and apartment building. Designed by Hiram A. Salisbury, the Ironcraft Studio exhibited all the characteristics of the Spanish Colonial Revival style; stucco -- surfaced walls, round-arched apertures, a pantile roof, and ornamental ironwork. It is perhaps presuming too much to claim that this building provoked the sudden enthusiasm for the Spanish Colonial Revival which soon flourished along South Main, but between 1928 and 1930 eight commercial buildings and churches were erected in the 1/2 mile segment extending between Elgin Avenue and Richmond Road, all exhibiting detailing and styling reminiscent of Michael's Ironcraft Studio.

Following the Ironcraft Studio's completion in 1927, Michael commissioned William D. Bordeaux to design Isabella Court. Completed in May 1929, it contained 16 apartment units focused around a central interior courtyard and a ground floor whose commercial tenants included a coffee shop, a savings and loan association, a cleaning and dye works, a neon sign agency, and the Fabian Bachrach photographic studios headed by Paul Gittings, who later opened his own studio in the same building.

Together, Isabella Court and the Ironcraft Studio Building occupied the entire blockfront on South Main Street between Truxillo and Isabella Avenues. Across Main Street and contemporary with Isabella Court were the 2-story A & P grocery market building and the contiguous Studio Building, a block of shops and offices also designed by Bordeaux in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style, as were the Hovas-Donovan shops which still stand several blocks to the north. Across Isabella Avenue from the Court, the architect William Ward Watkin constructed a stylistically sympathetic, 2-story commercial block. The vista, looking east down Isabella Avenue from Main Street, was framed by Isabella Court and the Watkin building before terminating in the imposing entrance pavilion of St. Agnes Academy, a girl's school designed by L. S. Green in 1907 and demolished in 1971.

William D. Bordeaux (1888-1954) architect of Isabella Court, practiced in Miami, Florida, during most of his professional career. Educated in engineering and architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York City, he worked as a draftsman in the firm of Daniel Burnham and Company in Chicago before moving to St. Louis and eventually to Los Angeles, where he remained during the 1910s and early 1920s. Employed initially in Los Angeles by A. C. Martin as supervising architect on Graumen's Million Dollar Theater and Office Building, Bordeaux soon established a practice of his own which extended to the design of several apartment hotels (the Birkel and Geisler), several theaters, industrial buildings, and a 150-bed hospital.

In 1925 he moved to Miami where he practiced until his death, with the exception of the period from 1927 to 1932, which was spent in Houston. Mr. Bordeaux's wife was from Miami, where her father was a real estate developer. The hiatus in Houston, as well as his return to Miami, were undoubtedly caused by prevalent economic conditions in each of the areas. His Miami work included a hotel (the Herendeen), a mixed-use retail and apartment building (the Katz Store and Apartments), several schools, and a variety of other commercial buildings and private residences. His Houston work included the Hovas-Donovan Shops of 1929 and the Studio Building of 1930, both previously mentioned, as well as a residence in the Riverside Terrace Addition (1927) and the River Oaks Addition (1932).

Isabella Court's Spanish Colonial Revival characteristics are manifested most evidently by the use of stucco as a finish material, pantile roofing material, general massing of the Main Street and Isabella Street facades (connected by the corner tower element), minimal ornament with a focus on light and shadow, and the use of wrought iron decorative features. The general aspect of the exterior confirms its consistency with the Spanish Colonial Revival allusions to the interior court.

An examination of the composition and detailing of ornament reveals the clear influence of Spanish architecture. The manipulation of the facade through shallow planar advance and recession indicates a reliance on massing rather than on detailing as the primary compositional device. Direct references include the plaster reliefs
(Guardamalletas/Lambrequins) occurring twice above the ground floor openings on the South Main Street elevation. Some of the detailing shows some Art Deco influence, such as the curved lintel motif above a number of shop windows on both street facades, and diagonally aligned windows articulating the double-height volume of 3911.

Since its completion in 1929, Isabella Court has been an enviable address at which to reside. Throughout the years, a variety of residents have enjoyed the romantic ambiance of this architectural oasis; past occupants have included painters, glass artists, sculptors, graphic designers, architects, and students. Isabella Court is truly an architecturally significant element in the Houston cityscape, which is further distinguished by the high level of structural and architectural integrity that remain. The current owners are committed to its thorough restoration and preservation for use as residential and retail space as it was originally designed.