Minella, Angelo and Lillian, House

The Minella house is an excellent local example of a ranch house as developed in Houston in the mid-twentieth century. Built for an Italian-American plumber, Angelo Minella, and his wife Lillian, the house was one of many post-war homes to experiment with new technologies in residential architecture. Architect Allen Williams created a building system using lightweight hollow concrete tiles which he called the "Century Built Home". The Minella House is one of four of these homes constructed in Houston. The house is significant as an architect-designed middle-class ranch-style house. It is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under criterion C in the area of Architecture as a good local example of the modern residential architecture that evolved in mid-twentieth century Houston.

The Location: The Wayside Corridor in the East End

The house is located in the Simms Woods subdivision about four miles east of present-day downtown Houston and one mile south of the Houston Ship Channel. This area of Houston developed rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century due to its location south of the industry along what would become the Houston Ship Channel but still near the bucolic rolling terrain along Brays Bayou and easily accessible to downtown via streetcar. During the first four decades of the twentieth century, a number of important cultural, social, and commercial institutions and developments were established in the immediate area. These included the Houston Country Club, the Forest Hill subdivision, The E. F. Simms estate, The Hughes Tool Company, Forest Park Cemetery, the Villa de Matel, the Idylwood subdivision, the Houston Country Club Place subdivision, and the Simms Woods subdivision. Because these sizeable tracts of land were tied up for long-term use the area has remained relatively stable compared to other sections of the East End.

The Simms Woods Subdivision is named for the estate from which the land was originally subdivided. Colonel Edward F. Simms, a Kentuckian, made his fortune in the oil fields of Texas and Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century. Sometime after 1910, he purchased several tracts of land along what would become South Wayside Drive and west of the exclusive Houston Country Club which had been built in 1903 and expanded to 156 acres in 1908.

At its peak from the 1920s through the 1940s, the Simms estate was one of the largest, most elaborate residential compounds in Houston. The estate, named Wayside, included a seven-bedroom stucco mansion, stables, reflecting pools, lakes, and one of Houston's first swimming pools. Over the years the family sold parcels of the estate, notably the southern sections along Lawndale Avenue that would become the Houston Country Club Place subdivision and the Simms Woods subdivision.

The Houston Country Club Place subdivision was begun in 1941 by developer C. E. King. The 49 acres King purchased from the Simms heirs at the corner of Lawndale Avenue and Wayside Drive constituted about half the Simms parcel. The street plan was comprised of long, gently curving east-west oriented blocks. The main entrance at Villa De Matel Road and Lawndale Avenue was marked by two matching monumental red brick piers.

The comparatively small, 20-acre, Simms Woods subdivision with 47 houses was developed in 1946 by R. S. Collins, president of the Texestate Corporation. Because the streets were designed to connect directly with those of Houston Country Club Place, most visitors fail to realize they are two separate developments.

Simms Woods would be an unremarkable postwar subdivision were it not for several architect-designed houses built along Brookside Drive. Architect William N. Floyd designed some of the earliest houses of his career in Simms Woods. His brick veneer Sharp House at 6327 Brookside Drive was one of the first six houses to be built in the subdivision. Floyd would later make a name for himself as the Houston equivalent of progressive California developer Joseph Eichler for his involvement in several Memorial area subdivisions from the mid-1950s with large concentrations of modern and contemporary houses. The Miller House, at 6315 Brookside Drive, designed by prolific contemporary architects Hood and Willard, was described in the Houston Chronicle in 1950:
...planned to be built entirely of masonry materials throughout its structural frame... The design employs large plate glass openings, one-way pitched ceilings, cove lighting, and the latest in electrical appliances and air conditioning.

The third architect associated with Simms Woods is Allen R. Williams, Jr. who designed the Minella House.

Allen R. Williams, Jr., Architect

Allen R. Williams, Jr. graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Texas and came to Houston in 1946. According to his wife, Thesalone Williams, he worked with such Houston architects as Cameron Fairchild and Staub, Rather & Howze on certain larger projects including the Texas Medical Center. He also worked extensively for subdivision developer Roy Harris for whom he designed "hundreds" of houses in the Ripple Creek subdivision, Tynewood subdivision, and others. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Williams devised a scheme for standardizing all masonry houses that he termed the "Century Built Home." The Minella house is one of three examples remaining of the four originally built. The Century Built Homes were innovative in construction and modern in design, however, William's other work seems to have been more conservative. He died in 1978.

Simms Woods and Houston Country Club Place were also unusual in that they quickly became a closely-knit Italian-American ethnic enclave. About 60 of the 156 houses in Houston County Club Place were owned by descendants of Italian immigrants and many of these families built large houses on corner double lots in both subdivisions, dubbed "Italian houses" by local residents." This was probably a factor in Minella's decision to build their house in Simms Woods in 1950.

Lillian and Angelo Minella

Lillian and Angelo Minella and their two daughters, Lillian and Janet, were originally from the Boston area. Angelo Minella worked as a plumber in the 1930s in the Brighton Center, Massachusetts commercial area, which had a large Italian-American population. As late as 1942 Angelo and Lillian were listed in the Essex County City Directory as living on Stanwood Avenue in Gloucester, Massachusetts." They probably left for Texas shortly thereafter. They first settled in San Antonio where Minella ran his own business. They next moved to Beaumont where Minella worked as a government inspector in the shipyards where vessels were being built for the war effort. He ran afoul of local shipbuilders who were used to giving bribes to inspectors to make up for a lack of quality control. According to his daughter, Janet Nolte, his strictness in this matter was his undoing, and the family was practically forced to leave Beaumont by resentful local businessmen. They then moved to Houston where Minella established a wholesale plumbing supply company.

According to the Houston city directories the Minellas first lived in Houston in 1946-47 at 6902 South Harbor Drive, Apartment 2. Lillian, Janet's older sister by eight years, was listed as a college student living at home. In 1948 the city directory listed Minella Plumbing and Heating Supplies at 2210 Lyons Avenue, Angelo Minella later relocated the company to a two-story building at 3100 McKinney Street. This building is notable for its large concrete eagle with outstretched wings perched on a globe, affixed to the gable. On the side of the building, one can still see faded letters reading "Minella Supply City Sales." Minella's company appears to have been a fairly prominent Houston institution and he frequently advertised in the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

According to his daughter, Janet Nolte, Angelo Minella, first saw a Century Built home being erected in Garden Oaks, the Pickens House at 851 West 43rd Street, in the late 1940s. After numerous Sunday afternoon inspections with family in tow he decided to hire its architect, Allen R. Williams, Jr., to design one for his own residence in Simms Woods. By the time the family moved into the Brookside house in 1950, Lillian was no longer living with her parents and Janet was in her last year of high school. Janet only lived in the house for one year and then left to go to college. Angelo and Lillian continued to live in the Brookside house until their deaths in 1982 and 1991 respectively.

During the time the Minellas lived in the house the surrounding neighborhood underwent considerable change. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a surge of construction activity coincided with the completion of the Gulf Freeway to Wayside Drive in 1951. Several significant examples of modern architecture, including the Minella House, were erected at this time. After this date, most new developments shifted south. The last remnants of the area's genteel origins symbolically disappeared with the removal of the Houston Country Club too far west Houston in 1957. The decades after were a period of slow decline as the middle-class inhabitants of Forest Hill, Idylwood, Houston Country Club Place, and Simms Woods began to move to more desirable outlying subdivisions. The East End became almost completely Hispanic in the 1970s. What was interesting about the area immediately surrounding the Minella house is that it still maintained its middle-class desirability, albeit with the new Spanish-speaking majority, while adjacent residential areas declined.

Century Built Homes

The Century Built Home was representative of an intriguing, though ultimately futile, effort on the part of a group of progressive modern architects and builders to reform American residential construction in the immediate postwar years. This desire seemed at first to be an echo of similar proposals from the Depression years when innumerable schemes were presented in national architecture magazines for rationalized construction techniques using new materials such as steel frames and new methods such as prefabrication. However, there were several differences. During the postwar years, after American industrial mobilization for the war effort had led to such impressive results, there was a pervasive sense that similar results could be achieved on the domestic front. The technologically advanced "House of 194X" was a popular trope that appeared over and over in the architectural press. Another difference was the extent to which this concern pervaded the entire country, not just the architectural hotbeds of the Northeastern U.S. and California as it had in the 1930s. Even in Houston, a provincial city in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a large number of schemes were presented in the local newspapers describing the work of Houston architects and businessmen to develop new residential construction techniques and companies to promote them. A third difference was the pragmatic approach that postwar architects took, in contrast to the hard-line stance the most prominent prewar modern architects followed. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House project of 1928, a circular metal house suspended off the ground on a large hollow mast containing a utility core, was such a ruthlessly logical application of technology that its final result was completely alien and unacceptable to the general audience for which it was intended. In comparison, the more conservative architectural design of the Century Built Home revealed a realistic attempt to accommodate American middle-class desires, albeit with an improved and unconventional product.

In Houston, during these years there were many architects involved in schemes predicated on the use of load-bearing masonry walls for residential construction. Phillip G. Willard and Lucian T Hood seem to have been the most prolific. They built a number of houses between 1945 and 1952 under the auspices of the Ceramic Construction Company. The use of the word ceramic indicated that they were using a baked clay product such as those available from the Clay Products Association of the Southwest. Anthony Luciano, a native of Italy who "did advanced study in concrete in Naples," designed several projects using a variety of masonry schemes in the early 1950s.

Dunaway & Jones designed a house in MacGregor Terrace using a "cellular concrete" system in 1950. Thomas E. Greacen II designed the Tucker House at Post Oak Land and Lone Star Drive in 1952 that used a "chemical process in the concrete [that] creates bubbles and produces lightweight material with insulating quality." Finally Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson designed the Emerson House formerly at 33 Saddlebrook Drive 1955 with walls made of three-inch thick Styrofoam planks sprayed on each side with one inch of concrete. In addition to these architecturally distinguished houses were a larger number of conventional houses, such as the house at 1003 Hackney Drive around the corner from the Minella House that was advertised by Black Brollier, a Houston-based manufacturer of lightweight concrete tile in the Houston Post on 4 January 1948.

The most commonly cited reason for the use of masonry systems was that they were fireproof. Other positive characteristics were its permanence, durability, and ability to deter rats and termites. For modern architects, drilled in the necessity of honesty of materials, the fact that masonry could be left exposed or simply painted rather than requiring a second layer of cladding was another reason for its appeal. According to an article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle about the Sarf House, the only Century Built Home to be published, Allen Williams expressed a desire to "reveal the natural colors and textures of the materials used."

It was unusual how this group of Houston modern architects would be interested in masonry building systems when in the architectural press the systems that received the most coverage were those based on lightweight steel frames, the best example which was the iconic Eames House of 1949 in Los Angeles designed by Charles and Ray Eames for their own use under the aegis of the Arts & Architecture Case Study House Program. The airy Eames House, with its visually complex web of thin steel members, presented nearly the opposite appearance of these substantial low-set Houston houses. These Houston architects were also notable for their concerns with climatic adaptation in design. Many of their projects from these years also included references to proper cardinal orientation for the Houston region and provisions for such things as sun shading and cross ventilation. The most publicized Houston modern architects of the 1950s were those working in the patrician Mieisan mode. Houston's well-known Miesian architects produced buildings where formal design was in the foreground, sometimes at the expense of construction and climatic considerations. This suggests that this forgotten group of architects was trying to create a regional modern architecture for Houston focusing on durable construction methods and designs that took into account the unique geographical characteristics of the upper Gulf Coast and treating formal and stylistic concerns as secondary.

How Williams devised the scheme for the Century Built Home is unknown. Also unknown was the extent to which he had backing from one or more of the developers he was working within the late 1940s and early 1950s. There was a construction company, Century Builders, whose name and phone number appeared on a large painted sign set in front of the Minella House as it was built and in the newspaper article describing the Sarf House. Century Builders, however, was never listed in the Houston city directory during the years the Century Built Homes were built.
The first known Century Built Home was the Pickens house that Angelo Minella took his family to inspect. The second was the Minella House. A third was erected for Carl Stallworth at 6648 Merry Lane in Idylwood in 1951. According to Stallworth, who still lives in the house, there was a fourth Century Built Home off Campbell Road north of Old Katy Road that he saw when it was open to the public. This house is no longer extant and its exact address is unknown. The fifth Century Built Home was the Sarf House of 1950, planned for the corner of Tangley Street and Rutgers Street in West University. It seemed not to have been built as Sarf was never listed in the city directory at that address.

The Century Built Homes were variations on a standard design, of which the Minella House seemed to be the most fully resolved. The plan of the Minella House has a living-dining room at the front of the house facing north. Along its east side was a sun porch that is glazed on three sides. To the west is the kitchen with its own exterior door and stoop. A corridor beginning at the rear of the living-dining room leads to a bathroom, two small bedrooms, and a larger master bedroom with its own bathroom. The plan of the Sarf House and the Stallworth House are both very similar to that of the Minella House. All of the Century Built Homes have large Roman brick-clad front chimneys with built in planter boxes and Roman brick cladding on the interior around the fireplace. The living area in each is covered by a tall shed roof and the kitchen, sleeping areas and bathrooms are covered by a lower flat roof. The roofs have a three-foot overhang. On the Minella House, the overhang varies according to location, for example, at the west wall of the master bedroom where there were no windows and the north façade the overhang is cut back to one foot. The garage of all the houses except the Stallworth House is detached and located at the rear of the property. Because the Stallworth House is on a smaller lot, its garage is located at the front of the house and connected with a short covered breezeway. Both the Minella and the Stallworth Houses have similar plumbing fixtures and kitchen cabinetry. All the houses have metal casement windows. None had central air-conditioning originally.

The cost of the Century Built Homes appeared to be moderate, the approximate construction cost of the Sarf House was listed at $11,000. At the time the equivalent wood frame houses in Oak Forest, Houston's largest early postwar subdivision, were selling for about $9,000. Although the architectural design of the Century Built Home was modern, both the Minellas and the Stallworths furnished their house with conventional furniture and interior decorations. This suggests that the masonry construction of the house was its most appealing feature to them, not its architectural design. The owners of Century Built Homes seemed to have all worked in the technical and industrial fields and doubtlessly would have appreciated such a building.

After Lillian Minella passed away in 1991, the daughters, Lillian and Janet, citing sentimental attachment, decided to rent the house rather than sell it. In 2004 they sold the house to the current owner Ben Koush who has restored it for his primary residence.

The happy fate of the Minella House represents a story that occurs much too rarely in Houston, a city characterized by ruthless economic speculation. Part of the reason for the house's survival was its location. This section of Houston was buffered by a variety of relatively large, long-standing commercial and institutional developments interspersed with comparatively small middle-class residential subdivisions. The size and scale of these heterogeneous developments were important to their longevity. They were not so small that they would be overwhelmed as demographics changed, nor were they so large that once the area started to change in the 1970s, they turned into large areas of blight. These residential subdivisions were small enough that residents felt a sense of solidarity and commitment even as surrounding areas declined. Driving along South Wayside Drive between Lawndale Avenue and Harrisburg Boulevard one notices the pleasant, suburban atmosphere; large areas of greenery at the Villa De Matel, the series of stone gates at Idylwood, the fairways of the former Houston Country Club, the large willow oaks of Houston Country Club Place and the remnants of the commercial development once limited to the blocks around the intersection of Harrisburg Boulevard and South Wayside Drive. This coherence is notable in a city where most of the urban field is a disorganized patchwork of incompatible uses. As such it presents an effective model of urban development in a suburban automobile-centered city.

In a city where developers are the ultimate arbiters of taste, this area has benefited doubly. Not only was the planning of the developments superior, but it supported a collection of distinguished examples of conventional and modern architectural design that was almost unparalleled in Houston. The modern design of the Minella House by Allen R. Williams, Jr. in Simms Woods is a good example. The Minella House is an important example of the development of modern architecture in Houston where a now-forgotten group of architects simultaneously tried to reform conventional suburban building practices and infuse even the most modest houses with a sense of place and permanence. As an excellent local example of this mid-century trend, the Minella house is nominated for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in the area of architecture at the local level of significance.