On to Shorewood!

The first Harold Bradley House (q.v. on the index page) is an acknowledged landmark which finds its way into most of the standard treatments of either Wisconsin or Arts and Crafts era architecture.  But the Bradleys evidently disliked it and soon had a second house built to which they transferred.  This lesser-known house, by Purcell and Elmslie, was among the first to be put up in the trendy Shorewood area, probably known best outside of Madisonian circles for being (roughly) sandwiched between Wright's Unitarian Meeting House and his Pew House, which is on the shore of Lake Mendota.

Although I went to photograph the house after the leaves had fallen, the second Bradley house is nevertheless very overgrown (to look at the property I'd guess through a mixture of desire for privacy and indifference to landscaping).  This is reflected, alas, in my photos.  Here is the front from the southeast.

2914 Oxford St., Madison WI.  Second Bradley House, Purcell and Elmslie, 1914.

As you can see, the house is well protected from casual inspection, and it is my policy never to intrude onto private property for a photo opportunity.  The glorious ribbons of casement windows are obvious, though the art glass in all of the ones facing Oxford St. is not.  The articulation of the windows through wooden trim and the battens on the second story balcony are neat against the white stucco.  The first story (the admirable Kristin Visser says it is a basement), in brick, is almost invisible in this photo, but see the attached garage at far left, which is connected via a covered gallery to the main, roughly rectangular body of the house.  I suppose the driver or guests lived above the garage.  Visser, who has probably seen the plans or old photographs, says the garage is a later addition not by the original architects.

The chimneys, I think, give us a pretty good idea of the articulation of the interior:  bedrooms above and living room below must exploit them on various sides.  Perhaps the next photo helps a little, at least to get an idea of the pattern of the art glass.  That is the second story balcony at center.

I took this picture because of the curious ornament just below the balcony--you can see it as a brown square perforated by fretwork.  I wondered a while about it, and the only solution to this unicum in the design I can think of is that here the architects are deliberately echoing the Sullivanesque ornamentation of the predecessor house (Elmslie was a draftsman in Sullivan's office, so it would not have been hard for him to do), or that perhaps an actual piece of the first Bradley house was incorporated into the façade of the second for sentimental reasons.

The north façade of the building is reasonably visible (though not too interesting), and offers the viewer a chance to estimate the scale of the house and what it looks like on the lake side.  It shows where art glass windows yield to plain ones (though I suppose the shape of the windows might betray a closed sleeping porch).

[See Visser's Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School in Wisconsin (Madison:  Prairie Oak Books, 1998) 111-112.]