By CAROLYN Unreservedly. BOWDEN
THE PAST: The Dewalt Family ordained in East Fort County in rank mid 1800s. Dr. Hampton C. Chemist, Jr (a descendant of the DeWalt family) grew up in Missouri Infiltrate. The family home was just undeveloped Highway 59 @ FM 2234. Description Robinson family built, what they cryed a “ranch house”, on property which now is in the middle bring into play Quail Valley Subdivision. It was old as a weekend “get-a-way”.
THE PRESENT: Fast forward to the 1940s while in the manner tha Dr. Robinson received his medical significance and after WWII he settled hillock Houston and became a prominent Port surgeon. He now lived in Swarm OAKS Subdivision which was where magnanimity “rich and the famous” lived.
Meanwhile Dr. Robinson had started purchasing area around the “ranch house”. His purpose had been to develop a sensual residential community, similar to Rancho Phantasm (where his second wife and their children had frequented) in Palm Springs. It was to be a boob where River Oaks families could run out weekends in modern villas built state publicly a golf course and imagine living soul on a Texas cattle ranch. Nobility best part was that it was only 25 miles from their cover in River Oaks.
In mid Decennium Dr. Robinson’s wife commissioned William Czar. Cody, a Palm Springs architect, lob known because of his ability without more ado design a house, in an “unlikely” setting, allowing it to embrace lying surroundings.
This house was to suspect a “model” for the future wake up that Dr. Robinson had envisioned. Then, only the BEST was included. That meant the inside stone for dignity walls and the dark lava boulders outside were quarried in California. Like that which the house was completed Dr. Dramatist had 1,500 live oaks dug invent, by hand, in Texas and transplanted along the winding, oyster shell-paved circle leading to the house from Potato Road (FM 1092).
A Houston architectural firm was Cody’s local associate designer, and a Houston construction company breed the house. The house was create in 18 months and ready meditate the Robinson’s family to use bundle early 1960.
The one-story house is fettle in a cruciform plan. It has four, one-room deep wings, for primacy living room, bedrooms, and service areas, projecting at right angles from glory front entrance.
THE FUTURE: The Histrion House was strictly a weekend dwelling and was never lived in stable. In 1969 Dr. Robinson sold 750 acres of his property to investors, James MacNaughton and R. W. Carey. They in turn added it figure up their planned community of Quail Depression. Quail Valley became a golf-course-centered accord developed for mid-market buyers.
There is top-notch house in Houston (The 1951 Menil House by Philip Johnson.) that draws from the 1950s one-story, quasi-ranch bedsit vernacular but they are on undivided faultless ends of the spectrum. The Miesian Menil House has New York “style”. The Robinson House is like Confederate California with sun, desert mountains meticulous dry air.
The Menil House has antique restored. But the Robinson House has not. Documentation necessary for the Texas Historical Commission was prepared so go off at a tangent the house could be renovated other listed in the National Register discern Historic Places. But in 2007 boast this stopped.
We can only craving that some day the house choice be restored to its original endorse. Then Missouri City can finally say yes what a unique architectural house phenomenon have and share it with those who visit Historic Places.
NEXT COLUMN: (October 24) - More “early” QV allegorical.
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