Mellinger, Marguerite Meachum & John S., House

The Marguerite Meachum and John S. Mellinger House, designed and built in 1930-31, is named for its original owners. It exemplifies the eclectic "country house" of the twentieth-century interwar period when American architects adapted historical models for the design of modern suburban single-family houses. It is a masterful example of the skills of its architect, John F. Staub, as the details and workmanship of the house possess high artistic values. The house, one of the iconic examples of interwar eclectic architecture built in the Houston garden suburb of River Oaks, is significant because it conserves to an unusual degree the exquisite qualities associated with the eclectic country house of the interwar period. In its thematically consistent integration of architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design, the Mellinger House represents the elite consensus on the Colonial Revival style that developed in Houston in the 1920s and 30s. As a domestic single dwelling that embodies the distinctive characteristics of the suburban country house type of the interwar period of the 20th century, and as the work of a masterful architect, the Mellinger House meets Criterion C, in the area of Architecture, for eligibility in the National Register of Historic Places.

Founding of the Community

Founded in 1836, five months after the Battle of San Jacinto decided Texas' independence from Mexico, Houston's namesake is Sam Houston, commanding general of the Texan army at San Jacinto and first president of the Republic of Texas. In 1837-38 Houston was the provisional capital of the Republic of Texas but forfeited designation as the permanent capital to the town of Austin in 1839. However, because Buffalo Bayou provided reliable navigational access to Galveston Island and the Gulf of Mexico fifty miles to the southeast, Houston became one of the most commercially important settlements along the Texas Gulf coast, although it was subordinate to Galveston for the duration of the nineteenth century.

During the 1850s, the wholesale merchants who comprised Houston's business elite began to invest in railroad construction. By the turn of the 20th century, Houston's railroad connections enabled it to outgrow Galveston. The construction of a deep-draft ship channel through Galveston Bay and up Buffalo Bayou between 1902 and 1914 enabled ocean-going vessels to bypass the port of Galveston. The discovery of oil on the upper Texas Gulf coast in 1901 led to Houston's emergence as a center of Texas' new oil exploration, refining, and marketing industry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Between 1920 and 1930, Houston's population expanded so rapidly that it rose in rank from the third largest city in Texas in 1920 to the largest city in the state by 1930 and after New Orleans the second largest in the South.

Rapid population growth and urbanization created a demand for new zones of residential expansion. Houston's most ambitious community-planning scheme of the 1920s was River Oaks, a planned residential garden suburb based on the "country club district" model associated with the Country Club District in Kansas City and Highland Park in Dallas. The development of River Oaks' first subdivision, Country Club Estates, began in 1924 adjacent to the golf course of the River Oaks Country Club. The developers of River Oaks Houston lawyer Will C. Hogg; his brother Mike Hogg; their sister, art collector and philanthropist Ima Hogg; and the Hoggs' associate, Hugh Potter saw River Oaks as an opportunity to introduce the most advanced standards of community planning to Houston. They especially emphasized the role that architecture and landscape architecture could play in giving the new community a distinctive identity. The corporation employed the foremost residential architects working in Houston, Birdsall P. Briscoe and John F. Staub, to design houses for the corporation. Staub and Briscoe collaborated on the design of the Hogg family's country house in River Oaks, Bayou Bend (1926-28, NRHP, 1979), and Ima Hogg commissioned the first professional landscape architect to permanently establish a practice in Houston, Ruth London, to design the East Garden, the first of Bayou Bend's designed gardens.

The Marguerite Meachum and John S. Mellinger House are significant as an example of the suburban "country house" built in River Oaks at the end of the initial phase of the community's development, just as it was beginning to be tested by the onset of the Great Depression.

Marguerite Meachum and John S. Mellinger

Marguerite Meacham Mellinger (1900-1989) was the daughter of Lucile Shaw and James McDonald Meachum (1876- 1957) of Navasota, Texas. Her father, a lawyer, served three terms in the Texas Senate before resigning in 1911 to move from Navasota to Houston, where he practiced law. Marguerite attended Kinkaid School in Houston and then studied music at Kidd-Key College in Sherman, Texas, and the Institute of Musical Art in New York, a predecessor of the Juilliard School of Music. She was a member of the Junior League of Houston, the River Oaks Garden Club, and the first docent class organized by Ima Hogg at Bayou Bend when Miss Hogg began the process of transforming her country house into the American decorative arts wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Like her husband, Mrs. Mellinger was a parishioner of Christ Church. Marguerite and John S. Mellinger were the parents of one daughter, Lucile Meachum Mellinger (Mrs. Brantly Harris).

John Sweeney Mellinger (1899-1979) was a Houston businessman. At the time he built this house, he was secretary of the J. J. Sweeney Jewelry Company, founded in 1875 by his maternal grandfather, John Jasper Sweeney (1850-1925), and manager of the J. J. Sweeney Estate. Sweeney, the U.S.-born son of Irish immigrants, advanced from being a pawnbroker to becoming a jeweler and an investor in Houston real estate. Mellinger's parents were Maggie Sweeney (1878-1910) and George J. Mellinger (1867-1960). George Mellinger became associated with his father-in-law's business in 1903 and was president of the jewelry company from 1925 until his death in 1960. After George Mellinger's death, John Mellinger became president of the Houston Production Company, an oil firm, and he continued to manage the Sweeney Estate. At the time of his death in 1979, John Mellinger was a member of the board of directors of First International Bank of Houston. He served multiple terms as a vestryman of Christ Church, Houston's oldest Episcopal parish, and was the parish treasurer for over twenty years. He was a founding trustee of St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in the Texas Medical Center and served on its board for more than twenty-five years. He was also president of the Episcopal Church Corporation, the business administration and property management arm of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. John S. Mellinger was a member of the River Oaks Country Club and the Coronado Club, a downtown luncheon club.

Colonial Revival Style and the Rise of the Suburban Country House

The "country house" was the distinctive type of elite American dwelling house characteristic of the period 1910 to 1940, but especially of the interwar decades of the 1920s and 30s. The name notwithstanding, "country houses" were more often built in suburban communities than in rural estates. What differentiated the "country house" type from its suburban predecessors such as the ponderous four-square type houses popular with Texan elites in the 1910 decade-was its relatively low-set construction (rather than being elevated above the ground on tall foundations), its proportional refinement, and the relaxed way that interior spaces opened to the landscape, often through French doors, loggias, and terraces, rather than through porches, which came to be coded as old fashioned. The country house type was typically two stories tall and double-fronted, with a formally composed elevation facing the arrival side of the house and another formally composed elevation facing the garden side of the house. The country house was often one- to one-and-a-half- rooms deep in the plan, extended along its cross-axis to ensure adequate ventilation and natural illumination. With its design based on identifiable historical prototypes, its materiality and decorative details were carefully modulated to maintain the consistency of the historic prototype without seeming antiquarian or theatrical. During the 1920s, such picturesque historical styles as the Tudor Revival and Spanish Revival threatened country house decorum because they were so often interpreted with exuberant exaggeration. Beginning in the late 1920s, American country house architects reacted against this threat by emphasizing simplicity and restraint, attributes that are perceptible in the Colonial Revival design of the Mellinger House.

The country house type was especially identified with housing built for elite clients in Texas during the 1920s and '30s. The country house type stood out as the modern house type associated with planned garden suburban communities such as the Houston neighborhoods of Riverside Terrace and Braeswood (both, like River Oaks, developed in the second half of the 1920s); the Dallas community of Highland Park; the San Antonio communities of Alamo Heights, Terrell Hills, and Olmos Park; the Fort Worth communities of River Crest and Westover Hills; the Austin neighborhoods of Enfield and Pemberton Heights; the Wichita Falls neighborhood of Country Club Estates; the Amarillo neighborhood of Wolflin Estates; the Brownsville neighborhood of Los Ebanos; and the Corsicana neighborhood of Mills Place. Most of these communities featured curvilinear street networks, in contrast to the gridded block and street pattern characteristic of pre-World War I urban residential neighborhoods in Texas. In each community, the planners architecturally adjusted the stylish country house types to their sites in ways that spatially differentiated them from the bulky, high-set, four-square type houses with overhanging roof eaves and front porches associated with the elite neighborhoods of Texan cities prior to World War I.

Stylistic eclecticism was characteristic of American domestic architecture of the 1920s and 30s. Among the genres based on European and U.S. historical models, the Colonial Revival was a popular stylistic alternative. In Texan garden suburbs of the interwar period, it is the pervasiveness of eclecticism that stands out rather than adherence to any one style.

However, the Colonial Revival, harking back to houses built by English colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in what became the U.S., stands out as one of the most popular choices. In the 1890s San Antonio architect J. Riely Gordon designed a house (which seems not to have been built) based on the model of the Vassall-Craigie- Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1759), the most frequently reproduced historical model for the first generation of Colonial Revival houses built in the U.S. beginning in the mid-1880s. In Texas, the popularity of the Victorian picturesque towered villa-type house as an elite house type during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was not challenged by symmetrically composed houses based on 18th-century prototypes until the very end of the century. The Michael W. Shaw House (1900) in the East End Historic District in Galveston stands out as possibly the earliest Texan house to incorporate not only Colonial Revival details but to internalize a Colonial Revival historical model. The C. L. Neuhaus House of 1911 in the Courtlandt Place Historic District (NRHP, 1979) in Houston is notable because its architects, Sanguinet, Staats & Barnes, sought to apply the Colonial Revival formula of the Vassall-Longfellow House to a four-square type house.

The preferred interpretation of the Colonial Revival in Texas in the early 1900s generally dispensed with 18th-century models altogether in favor of colossal columns, often paired, and galleries set within porticoes. Examples include the McFaddin-Ward House in Beaumont (1906; NRHP, 1971) by H. C. Mauer, the William Nash House in the Westmoreland Historic District in Houston (1907; NRHP, 1990) by H. C. Cooke & Company, and the Roy Hearne House at in the Monte Vista Historic District in San Antonio (1910; NRHP, 1998) by Atlee B. Ayres.

The T. J. Donoghue House (1916; NRHP, 1979) by New York architects Warren & Wetmore in Houston's Courtlandt Place Historic District introduced both the country house type and a refined, sophisticated interpretation of the Colonial Revival to Houston. The house emphasizes proportional discretion, the orientation of the house to its setting, the substitution of porticoes and loggias for porches, and the subtle enrichment of the house's surfaces through the application of historically appropriate materials and architectural details. The impact of the Donoghue House as a model is evident not only in the work of the Houston architects Birdsall P. Briscoe and William Ward Watkin but also in the houses produced by the Russell Brown Company, Houston's most prolific builder-designer of upper-middle-income housing in the 1910s and '20s.

In the 1920s, the alliance of the country house type and the Colonial Revival genre led to such houses as Birdsall P. Briscoe's summer house in River Oaks for the cotton exporter William L. Clayton (1924; NRHP 1984). Other examples include Staub's houses for Palmer Hutcheson (1925) in the Broadacres Historic District (NRHP, 1980) and for Kemerton Dean (1925), Hugh Potter (1926), Staub's own family (1926), and Hubert B. Finch (1927) in River Oaks. These houses demonstrate Staub's skill in interpreting the Colonial Revival, as he based his designs on a range of historical models vernacular and picturesque, as well as high style and formal. That Houston architects Staub, Briscoe, Watkin, and Joseph W. Northrop, Jr., and their peers in other Texan cities H. B. Thomson and Anton F. Korn, Jr., in Dallas; Atlee B. & Robert M. Ayres, Ralph H. Cameron, and Harvey P. Smith in San Antonio; Joseph M. Pelich in Fort Worth; Fred C. Stone in Beaumont; Voelcker & Dixon in Wichita Falls; and R. Newell Waters in Weslaco could sustain careers in the 1920s and 30s primarily by designing single-family suburban country houses bespeaks the extent to which Texan elites commissioned architects to design houses for them during the interwar period.

Architect John L. Staub

The Mellinger House represents the work of a masterful architect in the economy, precision, refinement, and wit with which its historic stylistic identity was integrated with its use as a modern, elite, suburban family house. Additionally, the subtlety with which a seemingly pastoral landscape was constructed around the house to give the impression of being "natural" while also engaging the house spatially with minimal reliance on symmetrical framing speaks to the skill of a talented landscape architect.

Houston architect John Fanz Staub (1892-1981) was the foremost country house architect of Houston during the interwar era and one of the finest architects to practice in Texas in the 20th century. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Staub worked for the New York country house architect Harrie T. Lindeberg from 1916 to 1923. Lindeberg sent Staub to Houston in 1921 to administer the construction of three houses Lindeberg had been commissioned to design there. In order to persuade Staub to remain in Houston, one of Lindeberg's clients got him the job of designing the clubhouse of the newly organized River Oaks Country Club in 1923. As a result of this commission, Staub made the acquaintance of Will Hogg and his siblings after they bought out the planned, but not yet developed, Country Club Estates subdivision adjoining the Country Club grounds in 1924. Staub was one of three architects that the Hoggs' development corporation retained to design several model houses in River Oaks. Staub bought a lot in Country Club Estates, and designed and built his family's house there in 1926, diagonally across the Del Monte- Larchmont intersection from the lots that John Mellinger would later buy. Staub became especially identified with River Oaks, where he designed thirty-two houses between 1925 and 1959. In addition to Bayou Bend, he was the architect of houses in River Oaks for Hugh Potter, Hubert B. Finch, Harry C. Hanszen, Wallace E. Pratt, George A. Hill, Jr., J. Robert Neal, Hugh Roy Cullen, Clarence M. Frost, Stephen P. Farish, Dolores Welder, George S. Heyer, Ray L. Dudley, Tom Scurry, Robert D. Straus, Dan J. Harrison, Claud B. Hamill, Edward H. Andrews, James A. Elkins, Jr., Ben M. Anderson, and George M. Peterkin. Additionally, Staub was also the architect of Rienzi, the River Oaks house of Harris Masterson III, which now contains the European decorative arts collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Within two years of beginning his practice in Houston in 1923, nationally circulated design and architecture journals House Beautiful and The Architect published Staub's houses. His houses also appeared in the Southern Architect and Building News in 1928, House and Garden in 1929, Architectural Forum in 1935, and Architectural Record in 1939. In January 1942, Pencil Points published an illustrated article reviewing Staub's career as a domestic architect, and his work was also included in the historical survey by Mark Alan Hewitt The Architect and the American Country House (1990). The Mellinger House has been published in two books on Staub's work: Howard Barnstone's The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South (1979) and Stephen Fox's The Country Houses of John F. Staub (2007). The 2007 book featured it on the dust jacket, and it was the subject of a feature story in the March 1985 issue of Texas Homes magazine. In January 1961, the nationally circulated journal Architectural Forum highlighted the Mellinger House as a representative example of River Oaks architecture in an article about the community.

The grounds of the Mellinger House are the work of Ruth London (1892-1966) and contribute to the significance of the property. London was the first landscape architect to establish a permanent practice in Houston. Born in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, London graduated from the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts, the first academic program in landscape architecture in the U.S. to admit women. Before coming to Houston in 1930, Miss London worked for Ellen B. Shipman, one of the foremost landscape architects practicing in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s. In Houston, Miss London worked for Mrs. Walter B. Sharp's Houston Studio Gardens before beginning her own practice in 1932. In addition to designing the East Garden at Bayou Bend for Ima Hogg, Ruth London designed the gardens of Staub's houses for Harry Hanszen, George Hill, Harry C. Wiess, and Ray Dudley. She also collaborated with Ellen Shipman on the design of the gardens of the Stephen Farish House. Ruth London's career and work were the subjects of a Master's thesis in landscape architecture at Louisiana State University by Kelly McCaughey Allegrezza (1999). Though much of the original London landscape has been retained, portions of it have been altered as additions were made to the house. Integrity is such that the landscape still contributes to the significance of the property. Albert Anton Bertelsen (1894-1970), the builder who constructed the Mellinger House, was born in Denmark and immigrated to the U.S. in 1916. He organized the A. A. Bertelsen Construction Company in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923 and moved it to Houston in 1926. Bertelsen also built the houses in River Oaks that Staub subsequently designed for Stephen P. Farish and Dan J. Harrison.

Architectural Significance and Artistic Values

In the statewide context of Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Revival architecture, the Mellinger House stands out for the dexterity and imagination that its architect John Staub displayed in designing the house as both a formal, symmetrical block and a picturesque asymmetrical assembly of wings, combining the opposed characteristics of 18th- century Georgian-inspired formality with the 17th-century picturesque colonial vernacular. Staub was exceptional among Texas eclectic country house architects in his ability to imagine the combination of historical genres that other architects treated as closed systems. The Mellinger House derives significance from Staub's practice of using picturesque planning and design practices to characterize the most technologically advanced parts of the house: the kitchen, service, and garage sectors. His unusual versatility is evident in the design of the portal framing the secondary, north-facing driveway entrance. Because the intermediate landing of the main stair occurs just above this doorway, the interior ceiling height at the entrance is minimal and there is a window lighting the landing that must be accommodated. This meant that externally the portal could not be as tall as that of the primary, street-facing entrance. Inasmuch as Staub wanted to mark this entrance with a formal architrave, he adapted the sort of detailing that appears on mid-eighteenth-century mantelpieces in Massachusetts houses the horizontal center panel between fireplace opening and mantle shelf framed by curved end pieces for application to the architrave of the portal, capping the window above with a curved pediment, as though the window opening were an overmantle panel. Staub's ability to improvise and invent within the framework of historical eclecticism is indicative of the virtuosity that set him apart from other eclectic architects in Texas in the 1920s and '30s.

The Mellinger House is also significant for the high artistic values evident in its design and craftsmanship. It is significant for its Colonial Revival design, which Staub cleverly organized to contrast the formal, symmetrically composed street front of the main block, centered on a pedimented portal, with the vernacular appearance of the east wing, with its steeply pitched, shingled roof, single dormer window, and segmentally arched loggia. Staub maintained this dialectical tension between high style and vernacular versions of the Colonial Revival by organizing the rear, north-facing elevation of the house asymmetrically, with the secondary entrance set within a rear-facing gable and most second-floor windows configured as dormers that project through the roof slope, which dips quite low along the east side of the garage. Staub faced the rear elevation of the house principally with wood shakes, suggesting that the rear of the house was of low-style 17th-century origin while the brick-faced street front was of later, more formal 18th-century origin. This implied narrative demonstrates the way Staub animated his houses by incorporating design variations often keyed to practical circumstances of use and orientation that moved beyond rote adaptation of historical models and implied that his houses had complex histories.

The main block of the Mellinger House faces south toward Del Monte Drive and the prevailing southeast breeze. Staub set the house much farther back on its lots than most of its neighbors, treating the broad front lawn as a garden, which reception rooms overlook without being too exposed to the street. The house is one to one-and-a-half rooms deep in the plan, extended along its east-west cross-axis to facilitate ventilation. Staub integrated the two-car garage with the house, using the east (kitchen) wing to mediate the distinctions between the formal main block and the picturesque garage. Staub cleverly mobilized opposed versions of the Colonial Revival (formal-symmetrical vs. vernacular-asymmetrical) to imbue his practical planning decisions with an architectural treatment that underscored (rather than suppressed) awareness of his use of a historical genre to design such spaces of modern technology as the kitchen, utility porch, and garage. His hierarchical gradation of detail (such as differences in the detailing of the front, primary, classical portal, the rear, secondary, classical portal, and the rear service entry, framed by a broad segmental arch) demonstrates his inventiveness in marking three entrance conditions architecturally to indicate their relative status within a matrix of prestige and service. The Mellinger House incorporates the defining characteristics of the suburban country house despite the fact that it is not large (the gross area of the original house is 4,534 square feet, which includes the garage). It is a low set, two stories high, and double-fronted. It extends in a one- to one-and-a-half-room deep linear configuration so that interior rooms can engage the house's landscape settings, especially through its street-facing loggia. Its design is based on a historical model of the Massachusetts colonial house of the second quarter of the 18th century-but reinterpreted to accommodate its 20th-century construction in a hot, humid, Southern coastal plain landscape; its elite family use; and its suburban setting.

Accommodation entailed the clever adaptation and transformation of historical details. Additionally, the house's appearance is restrained, emphasizing composure rather than theatrical display. This restraint is exemplified by the fact that both brick and shingle wall surfaces were painted white to de-emphasize material contrasts.

Staub's meticulous detailing, and the craftsmanship with which it was executed, maintain this narrative inside as well. The broad central hall, the spacious living room with its paneled walls and mantle-less fireplace, and the dining room with its shell-form corner cabinets and Zuber scenic wallpaper sustain the Colonial Revival narrative and provide the frame that Mrs. Mellinger filled out with a collection of eighteenth-century furniture, porcelain, and silver. Such details as the wall-mounted wrought iron light fixtures adjacent to the primary and secondary entrances, the wrought iron rail framing the front steps, and door handles and lock plates reinforce this theme in an unostentatious way. The Mellinger House is significant for the consistency, subtlety, and inventiveness with which Staub materialized its identity as a modern Colonial Revival country house.

The grounds surrounding the house display the skill of Ruth London in working with a characteristic Houston condition a flat site to shape outdoor space to complement the architecture. Although hedges outline the Del Monte and Larchmont fronts of the property, London gave the impression that the site is quite open by carefully staging the heights of massed plantings. This staging emphasizes the breadth of the property rather than its flatness. There is a cluster of shrubs at the southeast corner of the site, abutting Del Monte, which screens that corner of the property from the street and sidewalk and subtly frames diagonal views across the lawn toward the house. Mature shade trees are apparently randomly spaced to provide islands of shadow on sunny days. These also frame the front of the house, but indirectly. Low-clipped hedges parallel the front of the house. Rather than being planted at the base of the wall, they are set forward to screen a lateral brick sidewalk that connects the loggia terrace on the east side of the main block with a hedge-lined garden room laid out parallel to the west side of the house. London outlined these spaces with low hedges that serve as a datum for taller layers of massed plantings of differing textures and different shades of green. Only at the primary entrance are shrubs clipped in geometric shapes. Elsewhere plantings appear to be natural and spontaneous, engaging the symmetrical street front of the Mellinger House in the same kind of dialectical play as Staub's vernacular wings and rear elevation. Beyond the east end of the driveway are Staub's one-story garden house and a greenhouse. They adjoin a hedge-enclosed cutting garden set into the northeast corner of the site, in which gravel paths separate rectangular beds of flowering plants. The landscape architecture of the Mellinger House frames the house with subtlety and surprise rather than by simply reproducing design formulas.

An especially distinctive characteristic of the Mellinger House is the consistency with which its Colonial Revival design theme was adhered to not just by the architect but also by Mr. and Mrs. Mellinger. In this respect, the house and the decoration of its reception rooms display the impact of the Colonial Revival movement, even in parts of the U.S. that had no historical associations with the thirteen North American colonies of the British Empire. In a statewide context, Houston was unusual during the interwar period for the number of elite women who advanced stylistic positions through architecture. William L. Clayton's wife, Susan Vaughan Clayton, was an advocate for Colonial Revival. Blanche Harding Sewall was an advocate for the Spanish Revival. Ima Hogg was an advocate for a fusion of the Colonial and Spanish that she called "Latin Colonial" based on the Spanish Creole architecture of early 19th-century New Orleans. Just as Birdsall Briscoe worked with Mrs. Clayton and Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram worked with Mrs. Sewall on her house (NRHP, 1975) to shape their respective visions, John Staub worked with Ima Hogg to design several properties in the Latin Colonial style. These projects included a speculative house for the River Oaks development corporation (called the Latin Colonial House); ceremonial gate piers marking several of the entrances to River Oaks; one of Houston's earliest designed, car-oriented, suburban shopping centers; the River Oaks Community Center; and the Hogg's country house, Bayou Bend. Ima Hogg furnished Bayou Bend with a collection of American antiques that, in the 1950s, she began to expand and refine as she prepared to transform her personal collection into a museum collection.

Although other Houstonians collected for their personal enjoyment rather than as potential museum donors, Madeleine Delabarre and John Staub, Lillian Neuhaus and W. T. Carter Jr., Agnese Carter, and Heywood Nelms, and eventually Mellinger's sister and brother-in-law Marian Mellinger and James L. Britton Jr., like Marguerite and John Mellinger, assembled collections focused on 18th-century American furniture and artifacts. Like Miss Hogg and Staub, the Mellingers bought from the New York antique dealer Israel Sack. They also bought from Shreve, Crump & Low of Boston, John S. Walton of New York City and Connecticut, Elinor Gordon of Philadelphia, and the New York dealer Philip Suval. Because the Mellinger collection remains intact in the domestic setting in which it was formed, it preserves the aura of high-style 1920s and 30s Colonial Revival taste that captivated Houston's elite in the interwar period.