Wray, Andrew Jackson and Margaret Cullinan, House

The Andrew Jackson and Margaret Cullinan Wray House, built in 1938-39, is an exceptional example of the design skill of a regionally prominent architect-- John F. Staub. Built for the son-in-law and daughter of the developer of Shadyside, the house exemplifies the high standards of domestic design achieved during the period of Late 19th and 20th century Revivals in American architecture. Contextually, it relates to the influence of late 19th and early 20th century Revivals in the statewide context of Architecture in Texas. Accordingly, it is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in the area of Architecture as one of the best examples of the work of the Houston architect John F. Staub.

The Wray House was designed by John F. Staub, the most outstanding architect to practice in Houston in the interwar period. It demonstrates his unusual ability to reconcile the requirements of site planning, functional organization, and climatic responsiveness with the historically derived stylistic conventions of Late 19th and 20th-century Revivals in American architecture. The result is a work of architecture that is rigorously integrated yet subtly expressive. The Wray House corresponds to trends identified by Mark Alan Hewitt in his book The Architect and the American Country House, 1890-1940. Hewitt describes the interwar period as a time when American architects began to look to historic American building traditions for inspiration when designing new houses. He singled out John F. Staub as a notable figure in this trend.

The Wray House is an example of the Latin Colonial Style. This was an eclectic style that combined attributes of English Neoclassicism and the Spanish Creole architecture of late 18th and early 19th century New Orleans. Staub formulated this style in the 1920s with his client, the collector Ima Hogg, and used it in the design of her house, Bayou Bend, in Houston (1928; National Register, 1979). In the 1920s the creative invention of new "old" styles expressive of locale and local culture was characteristic of the most imaginative traditional architects in the United States. Staub and Miss Hogg agreed that the Spanish Creole architecture of New Orleans was the historic building tradition that ought to have been indigenous to Houston, a proposition that Staub advanced in an essay, "Latin Colonial Architecture in the Southwest," which appeared in 1928 in Civics for Houston, a magazine published by the Hogg family. Yet it is not simply a nostalgic reverence for regional stylistic tradition that makes the Wray House outstanding. It is because Staub integrated this romantic notion in the design of the Wray House in a rigorously spatial way that was characteristic of his work. By synthesizing the desire for a culturally resonant architectural style with multiple practical requirements, Staub demonstrated his exceptional architectural virtuosity.

Remington Lane curves in an arc around the site. Staub took positive advantage of this potentially awkward condition to organize the Wray House as a series of thin wings, faceted in plan to correspond to the curve of the street. Deploying the house as an unfolding screen, he gave an urbane spatial dimension to the passerby's experience of rounding this corner, while shielding the rear, south-facing garden from the street. The house's thin cross-section facilitated its single-depth room arrangement, which in turn worked to advantage in the natural ventilation of the house. Staub's provision of ironwork galleries on the south--garden--front of the house, a brick arcade on the west side of the street front, and floor-length, double-hung windows that slide into header pockets so that one can walk directly out-of-doors are consistent with the logic of the plan, the house's orientation and siting, and its historical allusions. As James Chillman, Jr., asserted of Staub's houses in an article in the nationally circulated architectural journal, Pencil Points, in 1942: "Consideration for the nature of the house, its settings and exposures, is carefully taken so that the finished structure seems to belong to the ground on which it rests. These are ideal conditions that most architects hope to accomplish. With John Staub, they are accomplishments" (Chillman:21-22). The Wray House was one of eight Staub buildings that Chillman illustrated in his Pencil Points article. Among Staub's many houses, the Wray House exemplifies to a high degree his ability to reconcile stylistic, spatial, functional, and climatic concerns architectonically. The consistency with which Staub performed this feat of architectural integration over the course of his career is what made him the finest architect in Texas during the interwar period.

The Wray House is located in the neighborhood of Shadyside, which was developed as a small 40-acre garden subdivision along Houston's newly laid-out Main Boulevard between 1916 and 1919 by the oilman J. S. Cullinan, founder of the Texas Company (Texaco) (see map p. 15). It was planned by the St. Louis landscape architect George E. Kessler and the Houston civil engineer Herbert A. Kipp, at the same time that they carried out Kessler's plan of improvement for the Main Boulevard Parkway and Hermann Park. Adjoining Shadyside to the south was the campus of the Rice Institute, opened in 1912, which was planned and designed by the Boston architects Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson. To the northeast was the site that J. S. Cullinan and his wife helped secure in 1916 for the Art League of Houston, on which the league built the first public art museum in Texas in 1924, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Shadyside thus lay at the center of a suburban civic arena, a planned landscape in the City Beautiful tradition of the early twentieth century, dedicated to high culture and refined domesticity. The real estate historian Christopher Gray remarked on Shadyside's place in the history of American suburban development when he characterized it as having gone "beyond the old private-street model to a more complex, picturesque layout. This in turn was a prelude to the planning of the larger country club districts of the 1920s, and Shadyside occupies a unique middle position in American residential planning".

Shadyside is especially notable for its fine eclectic architecture, most of it built in the 1920s. Although Houston's best-known architects of the period--William Ward Watkin, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Alfred C. Finn--designed houses there for the friends and associates of J. S. Cullinan, it was the four houses designed and built between 1919 and 1925 by the New York country house architect, Harrie T. Lindeberg, that make Shadyside especially distinguished architecturally (these include the D.D. Peden House, National Register 1990). To supervise the construction of these houses Lindeberg sent his young employee, John F. Staub, to Houston from New York in 1921. Staub remained in Houston and began his own practice in 1923. His only independent work in Shadyside was the Wray House, designed for Andrew Wray and his wife Margaret, the daughter of J. S. Cullinan.

John F. Staub (1892-1981) was a prolific architect whose specialty was the suburban country house. He was especially active in the Houston neighborhoods of Broadacres (National Register 1980) and River Oaks. He also designed large houses in Galveston, Beaumont, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Dallas, Shreveport, Memphis, and Knoxville. Staub was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His career was the subject of a scholarly book by Howard Barnstone published in 1979.

Andrew Jackson Wray (1900-1981) was the founder of a general insurance agency. He was born in Waco, Texas, and came to Houston in 1918 after service in World War I. During the 1920s Wray worked as a refinery laborer, surveyor, and roughneck in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico before returning to Houston where he married Margaret Cullinan and joined the insurance firm of Cravens, Dargan & Co. In 1945 Wray established his own insurance agency, which eventually came to be called Wray, Couch & Elder. In 1969 this was sold to the firm of Marsh & McClellan, with which Wray was affiliated until his retirement. He was chairman of the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and a member of the Tejas Club. Jack Wray was especially known in Houston business circles as the "pencil man" because of the pencils, embossed with humorous sayings, that he liberally distributed.

Margaret Cullinan Wray (1898-1985) was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lucie Halm and Joseph Stephen Cullinan. Her parents moved to Corsicana, Texas during her infancy, when her father first became involved with the Texas oil industry. After organizing the Texas Company in Beaumont, Cullinan moved his family to Houston in 1905. Mrs. Wray attended public schools in Houston and was a graduate of Smith College (1922). She was a founding member of the Junior League of Houston, whose New Orleans-style clubhouse was designed by John F. Staub in 1929 (now Brennan's Restaurant). She was also a member of the Garden Club of Houston. Mr. and Mrs. Wray belonged to the Houston Country Club and the Bayou Club (whose New Orleans-style building was also designed by Staub, in 1938). They were parishioners of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church (National Register 1985). Mr. and Mrs. Wray were the parents of one daughter.

The Wray House was built across Remington Lane from the site where Mrs. Wray's parents built their house in 1919. Behind the Wray property, facing Longfellow Lane, was the house of her brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Craig F. Cullinan, and the house that her brother-in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. J. Rorick Cravens, bought in the 1940s. Next door to the Wray House, Mr. and Mrs. Edward W. Kelley, Jr., built their house in 1938-39. Allie Autry Kelley was the daughter of J. S. Cullinan's long-time legal associate, Judge James L. Autry. Thus Shadyside's status as an elite enclave characterized by closely knit family and friendship ties continued into its second generation of occupants.

The Andrew Jackson and Margaret Cullinan Wray House substantially retains its integrity. By virtue of its regionally influenced style, its spatially expressive and climatically inflected planning, and its outstanding place in the career of one of Texas's most distinguished architects, the Wray House remains a visually prominent landmark in its small but historically significant neighborhood.