An unlucky house

Edward Elliott House,  137 Prospect St.,  Madison WI

This is really an excellent house, designed in 1910 by a first-rate architect, George Washington Maher.  It is its misfortune, however, to live in the shade of Wright's 1907 Gilmore House, the corner of which can be seen on the left in the photo above.

Typical prairie features are present:  hipped roof, boxed eaves with an exaggerated cantilever, horizontal emphasis on the board and batten cladding of the second floor, (modest) art glass, and stucco surface on the first floor.  Typical Maher features:  floral pattern in the art glass (a hollyhock), flared arch over the porch, and reflections of leitmotives throughout the design, in this case most easily seen in the battered profile of the porch roof supports which echo the battered profile of the first story walls.  Kristin Visser has inspected old photographs and states that the five battens on the second story exterior were originally as dark as the rest of the trim (and come to think of it, it would look a lot better that way).

  

Looking down at the porch, one can see that the door is flanked with art glass, and that the house rests on a good, Wrightian "water table", an exaggerated, highly visible register formed at ground level by the visibility of the pad on which the house sits.  Wright often puts a brick house on a white marble or concrete pad;  Maher has reversed this, putting a light-colored house on the brick pad.  (For all I know, the house has a basement, or sits on a concrete pad.  But Maher wants us to think the house sits on a brick pad.)

This side view shows the fussy little dormer and hints at a large dormer on the rear of the house (out of respect for the owners, I never intrude into private property and so have never seen the rear of the house).  The photo below, showing the addition on the east side of the house, also shows the extent of the rear roof dormer.

The closed porch and bay above it on the left side of the house (the east side, so I imagine it was envisioned as an breakfast room) break the otherwise symmetrical design, and are plainly additions.  The estimable Legler and Korab date the addition to the 20s, though Visser appears to take the addition to be an original part of the house.  It's not a bad addition, compared to some, though it's always sad to see a name architect's work altered.  I do wonder about that dormer hidden away behind the chimney, though.

Legler and Korab publish several of the latter's characteristically beautiful photographs and should be consulted to get a feel for the lovely interior.

[See Prairie Style.  Houses and Gardens by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School (New York:  Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1999), written by Dixie Legler, photographs by Christian Korab:  pp. 100-105; Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School in Wisconsin. An Architectural Touring Guide (Madison, Prairie Oak Press, 1998) 101-102.]