Logue House

The Logue House (also known as Milford House), constructed in 1923, is an example of a classically detailed country house built for an upper-middle-income Houston family on a town block. The use of high-style classical architectural decoration and a mixed blend of dark red, velour-faced brick identifies the Logue House with a trend in Houston domestic architecture evident between 1915 and 1925 that had definite social-historical implications. Its adaptation as the clubhouse of a women's social organization in 1953 bespeaks the effects of mid-20th-century urban growth on town neighborhoods where land use was not controlled by zoning codes or restrictive covenants. Contextually, the house relates to the statewide context of eclectically styled country house architecture in Texas in the 1910s and 1920s. In a secondary capacity, it relates to Community and Regional Planning in Texas as a product of the suburban growth of Houston and the persistence of established forms of elite residential real estate development. The house meets Criterion C, significant at the local level of Architecture, as a prominent example of classically detailed domestic architecture by a well-known Houston architect and for its contribution to the development of an urban residential neighborhood whose vicissitudes reflect real estate transformations in Houston, the only major city in the United States not to adopt a zoning code during the 20th century.

Houston grew from the third-largest city in Texas to the most populous city in the state between 1920 and 1930. This was because of a period of sustained economic expansion that began during World War I, based on Houston's status as a petroleum processing and exporting center (Houston, A History and Guide: 112-118). Expanding wealth and an expanding population meant that as Houston's commercial and industrial sectors spilled over into older residential neighborhoods, new residential districts for almost all sectors of the population were developed on the periphery of the city. New residential real estate development followed an uneven trajectory, however. Houston's best-known residential development of the 1920s was the elite garden suburb of River Oaks, begun in 1923. River Oaks represented the state of the art nationally in terms of planned suburban real estate development. Other evolutionary stages in the development of residential real estate were represented in Houston. The polar opposite of River Oaks was the N. P. Turner Addition. Its gridded street plan and square blocks, its lack of allusive nomenclature, architectural symbols of exclusivity (such as gate piers), and--most important--restrictive covenants proscribing non-residential and multi-family residential land uses meant that the Turner Addition was much more like 19th-century "additions" to Texas towns than their 20th-century suburban successors. Yet by virtue of its proximity to Montrose Boulevard, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Main Boulevard parkway, and the elite "private place" neighborhood of Shadyside, the Turner Addition initially attracted affluent families who built stylish, architect-designed "country houses" on the subdivision's flat, mostly treeless blocks between 1920 and 1924.

After 1924, the construction of apartment, retail, and institutional buildings began to make the Turner Addition much less attractive for expensive single-family residential construction, especially as it was ringed by such economically stratified, deed-restricted residential enclaves as Chelsea Place, Colby Court, West 11th Place, Waverly Court, Shadowlawn, and Broadacres. Affluent residents in the Turner Addition resorted to a strategy of spatial control characteristic of Houston's 19th-century neighborhoods: the clustering of contiguous households related by family or professional associations. The Houston architect William Ward Watkin, who designed most of the large houses built in the Turner Addition between 1919 and 1924, contributed to this process of defensive identification. Watkin coded his houses typologically, materially, and decoratively to reflect the influence of a specific Houston house, the Donoghue House in Courtlandt Place of 1916, which served as the model for introducing the suburban "country house" to the town neighborhoods of early 20th-century Houston.

The Logue House was built for Kate Holloway and John Gibson Logue. Logue (1882-1933) was a partner in the law firm of Andrews, Streetman, Logue & Mobley, one of the most important corporate law firms in Houston. Both Mr. and Mrs. Logue were from Colorado County, Texas. They were the parents of one daughter, Kathryn Lyle Logue (Hooper). A $20,000 construction contract for the Logue House was awarded to the Houston contractor W. L. Goyen in February 1923. Logue lived in the house until his death. After her husband's death, Mrs. Logue transferred the west half of Block 24 to her son-in-law and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew J. Hooper, who built the house at 1105 Milford. In 1937, Mrs. Logue sold her house to the oilman Cornelius C. Kroll and his wife, Grace, and moved to The Warwick. Mr. and Mrs. Kroll lived in the house until 1951 when they sold it to the Woman's Building of Houston, Inc. From 1951 until 1978, the Logue House served the Woman's Building of Houston as Milford House, a social club. When the Woman's Building of Houston was dissolved, it gave Milford House to Rice University for use by the university's Shepherd School of Music. In 1988, Rice University sold the Logue House to the Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Greater Houston, Inc. The federation operates the Italian Cultural and Community Center at Milford House and uses the property for a variety of educational, social, and community functions.

The Logue House meets Criterion C in the area of Architecture because it embodies the distinctive characteristics of the country house type, represents the changing state of elite domestic architecture in Houston in the early 1920s, and represents the work of a locally distinguished architect. The Logue House was designed by William Ward Watkin (1886-1952), the first professor of architecture at the Rice Institute in Houston. It is one of six houses built in the Turner Addition to Watkin's designs. It was built at the same time that Watkin designed the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1921-24), and the street layout and landscaping of the planned elite subdivision of Broadacres (1922-23), both adjacent to the Turner Addition. The house derives significance from its design by Watkin, one of Houston's most important architects in the 1920s. His major works include Trinity Church, Houston; Autry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel, Houston; the Chemistry Building (1923) and the Cohen House (1927) at Rice University, Houston; the Julia Ideson Building of the Houston Public Library; the master plan and original campus buildings of Texas Technological University, Lubbock, Texas (1924, NR 1996); Wilson's Stationery and Printing Co. Building, Houston; and the chancel reconstruction and Golding Memorial Chapel at Christ Church, Houston. Watkin married the former Annie Ray Townsend in 1914, four years after he moved to Houston. Like John Logue, Mrs. Watkin was from a prominent family in Columbus, Texas, which may account for Mr. and Mrs. Logue's choice of Watkin as their architect.

The Logue House derives significance from its spatial organization as a "country house." This term, in its early 20th-century American architectural use, identified a house that opened out to its gardens with French doors, loggias, and terraces, as though it were freestanding on a suburban country estate, even when built on a town lot. The street front of the Logue House faces north, but its principal reception rooms (the living room, dining room, and a loggia room) and its bedrooms are oriented to the east and south, the direction of the prevailing southeast breeze in Houston's hot, humid climate. The entrances, original kitchen and service rooms, bathrooms, and stairs were concentrated on the west and north sides of the house.

The spatial organization and decorative detailing of interior rooms articulate this dichotomy through a selective application of classical architectural decor. The principal reception rooms are symmetrically composed and ornamented with classically detailed millwork, as is the master bedroom. Other bedrooms and service zones of the house display proportionally less decoration. The reception hall and main stairs are the only plan spaces in the north and west sphere of the house where this southeast/northwest dichotomy is not observed. The interior of the Logue House derives significance from its organization into functional zones where provision for climatic comfort spatially represented social distinctions made in Houston in the 1920s between the honorific and service areas of an upper-middle-income household. The Logue House derives additional significance from its classical architectural interior detail, which highlights its status as an upper middle-income family residence and is applied in spaces where guests of the family were most likely to be entertained. It derives significance from its substitution of the rear-facing loggia room (the principal open-air social space of the house) for the street-facing front porch, a substitution that began to occur on fashionable Houston houses in the mid-1910s.

The Logue House derives significance from William Ward Watkin's use of classical architectural detail to emphasize externally the asymmetries of the house's plan rather than to identify it with any particular stylistic genre, such as the neo-Georgian or Tuscan villa styles. Watkin arranged openings asymmetrically on the planar elevations of the house, even though 19th-century academic propriety dictated that symmetry be observed for classical architecture and asymmetry for non-classical and picturesque historical styles. Watkin sought to balance unlike parts compositionally and compensated for the lack of ruling symmetry with numerous instances of local symmetry (visible on the street in front of the house). Watkin used decoration expressively to identify hierarchical gradations in use. For example, the front entrance portal is elaborately ornamented with high-style classical detail. The secondary entrance from the driveway is decorated in a less effusive manner, while the rear service entry to the house is treated with minimal honorific decoration. The Logue House is significant for representing the liberty American country house architects felt in using conventional architectural ornament in unconventional ways to highlight differences in functional and climatic conditions.

The Logue House derives significance from its facing with a mixed blend of dark red, velour-faced brick, its decoration with classical architectural ornament, and its typological organization as a "country house." This combination of material, ornament, and house type was introduced to Houston with the Donoghue House of 1916, designed by the New York architects Warren & Wetmore. The sophistication of the Donoghue House gave it immense prestige in Houston, as can be seen in numerous variations on its designs built in Houston's elite neighborhoods during the first half of the 1920s. William Ward Watkin seems to have been especially affected by the design of the Donoghue House. His Priddie House in Beaumont (c. 1920) mirrors the composition of the Donoghue House. Watkin was especially influenced by Warren & Wetmore's choice and detailing of materials. He repeatedly used mixed blends of dark red, velour-faced brick on his Houston houses of the first half of the 1920s (including three other large houses in the Turner Addition--the now demolished Masterson House of 1922, the Armstrong House of 1924, and the Scott House of 1924), as well as on the gate piers of Broadacres. He repeatedly enriched wall surfaces with ornamental brick bonding patterns, as Warren & Wetmore did at the Donoghue House, and he selectively applied classical architectural detail to articulate hierarchical distinctions in the planning of his houses, as occurred at the Donoghue House. Watkin even reproduced the wide, brick-paved sidewalk that Warren & Wetmore installed at the Donoghue House. Following the example of Warren & Wetmore at the Donoghue House, Watkin broke with long-accepted patterns of elite domestic spatial organization to re-orient the major rooms of his houses away from the street front toward the prevailing southeast breeze and private rear gardens. The Logue House derives significance from its association with a set of material, decorative, and spatial conventions that signified high status in Houston in the early 1920s.

The Logue House derives significance from certain details that bespeak its time of construction, its architect, and its place in the broader context of American country house architecture in the early 1920s. The earth berm on which the house was built was a landscape feature that Watkin used at his Hughes House of 1918 in Houston's Montrose Addition, his Wiess House of 1920 in Shadyside, and his Heitmann House of 1924 in Shadyside. The first two houses built in the neighborhood of Shadyside, completed in 1918 and 1920, were also set on berms. This represents a method of protecting houses from flooding caused by the combination of intense rainfall and non-absorbent clay soil characteristic of Houston, a concern alleviated once the City of Houston extended storm sewers to the area in the early 1920s. The Logue House derives significance from such domestic spaces as its bathrooms, dressing room, first-floor powder room, and basement-level furnace room. These spaces and the equipment they contain exemplify the domestic technology, and architectural finishes, thought fitting for an upper-middle-income house of the early 1920s. The Logue House derives significance from the configuration of its stair, which consisted of separate, parallel lower runs connected by a door at the main landing to a single upper run. This feature subtly identifies the Logue House as less grand than more expensive Houston houses with completely separate front and back stairs.

Particularly characteristic of William Ward Watkin are the insistently vertical proportions of the Logue House, and the amount of surface ornamentation visible on the house. These attributes identify the Logue House as somewhat retardataire architecturally, in comparison with the larger, but similarly conceived Peden House of 1924 in Shadyside (NR, 1990), designed by the New York architect, Harrie T. Lindeberg, makes clear. Lindeberg, one of the most outstanding country house architects in the U.S., planned the Peden House to take advantage of the prevailing breeze. Therefore, the house was oriented to face its private garden rather than the street. Lindeberg also arranged classically detailed architectural elements on the asymmetrically organized entrance front of the Peden House. What differentiated the Peden House from the Logue House (and Lindeberg, the acknowledged master, from Watkin) were Lindeberg's generous proportions, his less compulsive use of conventional decoration, his subtle enrichment of wall surfaces, and the Peden House's proximity to the ground plane and its gardens. The Logue House derives significance from elements that, in a national architectural context, identified it as aspiring but provincial. It also derives significance from its status as a country house built in a town neighborhood. Because new trends in domestic architecture were adopted more swiftly than new trends in suburban real estate development, the Logue House shares this condition with country houses in other Texas cities and towns, such as the Partee House in San Antonio of 1920 by Atlee B. Ayres (NR, 1984) and the 20 by Atlee B. Ayres Astin House in Bryan of 1922 by H. B. Thomson.

The Logue House derives significance from a portion of the abandoned driveway now used as the sidewalk to the Bayard entrance to the 1953 wing. An aerial photograph of 1924 shows that the driveway connecting the Logue garage to Milford Street was intersected by a secondary driveway, running behind the house to Bayard Lane. The abandoned driveway represents material evidence of how highly one affluent Houston family valued mobility in the 1920s, subverting the careful distinctions between recreation and service spaces on which the siting and design of their house were predicated to facilitate the movement of automobiles.

The Logue House also meets Criterion C because of its connection with the N. P. Turner Addition, a residential subdivision whose checkered history reflects the vicissitudes of real estate development in 20th-century Houston. The Turner Addition was platted in 1871 as a subdivision of 55 blocks, spanning from what is now Richmond Avenue on the north to what is now one block south of Bissonnet Avenue on the south, and from what is now Roseland Street on the east to what is now Graustark Street on the west. This tract was more than two miles outside the town of Houston in 1871. Therefore, it was not developed until Montrose Boulevard was extended to connect with Main Boulevard in 1916. As Houston's suburban periphery advanced toward the Turner Addition, its northernmost tiers of blocks were replatted in 1914 as the subdivision of Rossmoyne (Sterling- Berry House, NR, 1983). The southernmost tier was replatted between 1919 and 1923 for incorporation in the subdivisions of Shadyside, West 11th Place, Waverly Court, and Shadowlawn. Portions of the easternmost blocks were incorporated into Chelsea Place. All of these subdivisions conformed to the private place model. All had restrictive covenants prescribing single-family residential occupancy, and most had gate piers to symbolize their private place status. The portion of the Turner Addition that was not replatted also began to be developed after the extension of Montrose Boulevard. However, its block structure, based on the street grid of downtown Houston, was not reconfigured. Because property in the Turner Addition was not under unified ownership, restrictive covenants were never imposed.

A real estate investor's memorandum, prepared in May 1922, noted the diversity of ownership in the Turner Addition. The City Directory of 1922 lists the streets in Turner Addition but few residents; on Milford Street only Mr. and Mrs. Hiram O. Clarke, Jr., were listed. In the 1923-24 edition and thereafter until the early 1930s, there was a steady increase in the number of new residential listings. The investor's memorandum of 1922 noted that many of the property owners were "among the substantial citizenship of Houston, and in most cases, contemplate building for themselves or for members of the family." The investor advised his client to consider buying at least a quarter block allotment "as you would in this way be able to select your neighbor." (C. V. Jarrell to James L. Autry, Jr., 4 May 1922, James L. Autry Papers) The lack of restrictive covenants was not cited as a problem. The memorandum noted that the owner of Block 24 (John G. Logue) intended to build a house on one-quarter of the property and sell the rest.

The patterns of home building that this memorandum took for granted were more akin to the patterns that prevailed in Houston before residential additions began to be developed as planned subdivisions under the control of a single development corporation. Creating enclaves of family members or professional associates was one way that members of Houston's 19th-century elite sought to stabilize urban residential real estate. The earliest of such enclaves in the Turner Addition comprised four houses in the 5200 block of Bayard Lane built by three members of the Rice Institute faculty and the architect J. W. Northrop, Jr. (two of the four were designed by Watkin). Other Rice faculty members lived in the Turner Addition, several clustering in the block of Milford between Yoakum and Mount Vernon. Two sons of the lawyer James A. Baker, chairman of the board of trustees of the Rice Institute, built their houses back-to-back on Block 11 and H. Malcolm Lovett, the son of Rice's president, built his house across Berthea Street from one of the Baker sons, W. Browne Baker, who had married Lovett's sister. The corporation lawyer, Sam Streetman, bought two contiguous blocks in the Turner Addition between Milford and Banks Streets in 1916.

Between 1919 and 1931, two of Streetman's daughters (Nell Streetman Clarke and Flora Streetman Lindsey) and his two sons (W. McIver Streetman and Sam Streetman, Jr.) built houses on Block 29, across Milford Street from the Logue House. Streetman was the senior partner in John Logue's law firm. After Logue's death, Mrs. Logue gave their daughter, Kathryn Logue Hooper (a graduate of the Rice Institute), the half-block front at 1105 Milford Street adjoining the Logue House property on the west. There, Mrs. Hooper and her husband, the engineer Andrew J. Hooper, built their house in 1934. These residents, linked by professional and family associations, were to be numbered among the "substantial families" to which the memorandum of 1922 alluded. The Logue House, by virtue of its proximity to the Streetman family houses and the Hooper House and its indirect associations with the Rice Institute, contributed to a pattern of residential settlement especially characteristic of the Turner Addition, and in turn an older Houston.

In 1924 multifamily residential construction began to occur in the Turner Addition, beginning with the construction of the four-story Montrose Apartments (now demolished), followed by the 8-1/2-story Plaza Apartment Hotel (1925). The Plaza was built next to a single-family house facing Montrose Boulevard and across the street from the grandest house in the Turner Addition, Watkin's Masterson House. In 1926, four years after it was built, the Masterson House was converted into business premises. Will C. Hogg, who was the driving force behind the development of River Oaks, had first planned to develop the Colby Court subdivision, adjoining the Turner Addition on the east, as his family's enclave. Hogg decided against this in 1920 after the grocer Joseph Jett opened a store on Montrose in the Turner Addition that backed up to Colby Court. In early 1929, controversy erupted after it was announced that a commercial laundry and dry-cleaning establishment would build a plant on Montrose Boulevard, backing up to Bayard Lane across from the Logue block (Houston Gargoyle: 15 January 1929). Although the laundry was not built, it illustrated the vulnerability of the Turner Addition, where no legal mechanisms existed to control land use, especially after a proposal to enact a zoning code was tabled by the Houston City Commission in 1930.

The Logue House derives significance from its location in a neighborhood whose upper-middle-income status was challenged within less than a decade of its development by the pressures of urban real estate development. When the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, was eventually built on the laundry block in 1940, it deferred to the Logue House with its exterior finish of mixed blend, dark red brick, and its use of classical architectural ornament. The Logue House derives significance from its effect on the design of this institutional building, which sought integration in its neighborhood setting by reflecting the architectural characteristics of the Logue House.

The Logue House derives significance from its conversion into the clubhouse of a women's social organization between 1951 and 1953. In July 1951, the Logue House was acquired for $65,000 by the president of the Woman's Building of Houston, Inc., the veteran performing arts impresario Edna Woolford Saunders. Mrs. Saunders commissioned the Houston architect Robert C. Smallwood to add a 2,500-square-foot wing, containing an assembly room seating 300 people and an institutional kitchen, to the back of the house, and to install central air-conditioning. Smallwood's addition and remodeling, costing approximately $66,000, were completed in 1953 and the Woman's Building, called Milford House, was dedicated on 11 November 1953.

When large houses passed out of residential use, as occurred with the Logue House, their neighborhood settings sometimes made them attractive to institutions seeking an aura of domestic gentility. Women's clubs with a middle or upper-middle-income constituency represented a type of institution attracted to large houses in genteel but transitional neighborhoods. The Woman's Club of San Antonio acquired the Woodward House of 1904 (NR, 1996) for such purposes. Mrs. James L. Autry of Houston converted her mother's house in Corsicana, Texas, into Kinsloe House, which could be rented for receptions and meetings. In Houston, the Junior League of Houston built a purpose-designed, red brick, New Orleans-style clubhouse in the unrestricted South End, just outside the east gate of Courtlandt Place (NR, 1979-80), in 1930. The River Oaks Garden Club acquired the domestically-scaled ex-Forum of Civics Building adjacent to River Oaks in 1942 (NR, 1987). The City Federation of Women's Clubs bought the imposing red brick, Georgian Revival style Bullock House (1925) on Lovett Boulevard in Montrose Addition, just outside the west gate of Courtlandt Place, in 1947. The Georgian Revival combination of light-toned classical architectural detail and red brick surfacing marked two of the largest purpose-built women's clubs' buildings in early 20th-century Texas: the Women's Club of El Paso of 1916 (NR, 1979) and the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs Building in Austin of 1933 (NR, 1986). Milford House, by virtue of its setting in a respectable mixed-use neighborhood, its proximity to fashionable neighborhoods and such cultural institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts, and its "gracious" ambiance and red brick and white classical architectural imagery contributes to the architectural context of social institutions built for, or occupied by, women's organizations in Texas during the 20th century.

The Logue House represents the transitional nature of urban residential real estate development and upper-middle-income domestic architecture in Houston in the 1920s. It represents the work of the Houston architect William Ward Watkin during that decade and bespeaks the impact of new models of domestic style on the imagination of Houston's elite. Its conversion into a genteel social club resulted in modifications to the Logue DE
House. However, conversion to non-residential use entailed the preservation of the house, its principal interior spaces, and its grounds so that its original status as an elite country house remains apparent. Despite alterations and additions, the Logue House retains substantial integrity as a 1920s single-family residence.

The Logue House is worthy of preservation because it spatially represents a complex of associations characteristic of Houston's domestic architecture and community planning in the 1920s. By virtue of its typological identification as a suburban country house, its architectural connection to a locally admired model of stylish domesticity, it's siting on a town block in an unrestricted residential neighborhood, its location within an enclave defined by professional and family connections, and its association with a locally important architect, the Logue House is eligible for listing in the National Register. Its architectural presence and its connection to its neighborhood setting have encouraged its owners, the Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Greater Houston, to preserve the Logue House as the Italian Cultural and Community Center and seek recognition of its historical significance.