Great House, Unhappy Addition

Watkins House, 1930 C Street, Lincoln NE

This is a beautiful example of a prairie style house, which would be an ornament to any state.  The McAlesters credit Lincoln architects Fiske and McGinnis with the 1916 design.  It is in the Mt. Emerald subdivision, Lincoln's most interesting neighborhood.

  

There is so much of interest in this house that it is difficult to know where to start.  Let's arbitrarily start at the top.  The very low-pitched roof is perfectly in the prairie spirit;  see how the chimney offers a fireplace in what is probably the master bedroom on the second floor.  The boxed, cantilevered eaves are as large as those one would find in landmark examples of the style, and the ribbon of casement windows feels just about right, though I regret they do not feature art glass.  The room with the (nearly) wraparound windows must be tremendously exciting, though a few more windows on the E side, over the sleeping porch, would be welcome (but see below).  Also a nice touch are the stuccoed soffits of the eave.

Wood clads the upper floor;  the stucco in beige below, matching the eaves, is a trademark prairie style;  the clapboard siding below (which I suspect of being an addition) adds a graphical horizontal touch such a house demands, especially as they are extended into the fence around the sleepig porch.  The steps (painted to echo the roof, I suppose), door mullions, planter box decorations, and cement water table all add in this department.  The presence of a basement is regrettable.  I like the brick piers bracketing the entry very much, because they add to the interest of the juxtaposed rectilinear masses of the house.

Even the landscape architecture is well thought out, with the effect of the cherry tree in the rear quite in the spirit of things.

But not all is well here.  The window on the right front lower floor is orphaned way out there in the corner, and its the proportions are all wrong in comparison with the casement windows above and the sidelights of the main entry. In addition, that bay window with awful shed roof we see in profile is the proverbial 3-dollar bill. See also the sudden lowering of the ground level on the far right side of the house, which just corresponds to the basement, which is so out of character in the prairie style. In fact, this house, once you look at it, is a patchwork of clumsy alterations, and a bit of deduction leads me to the conclusion that it was all for BOBO purposes (Steven Brooks' term for bourgeois bohemian).

Let's have some fun and take it apart. The awful bay window no doubt sits above a sink in an add-on kitchen; the add-on front window offers more light on the northern, darker side of the house. The house was once symmetrical about the front entry, with the chimney, in slight disobedience to prairie canons, on the periphery, on the western wall. Originally the roof was cantilevered as far out over the edge of the house on the right (western) side as it still is over the eastern side, and this reveals the size of the addition. The addition brought an opportunity to add a basement (or at any rate, to increase the size of whatever existed before) with an intrusive transom below the add-on casement windows which is just as out of place. And yet, see how the upper floor on that side maintains a relatively constant width of the eave (adjusting for the chimney), whereas the left side has walls that reach out all the way to the edge of the eaves, breaking the expectation of a symmetrically projecting cantilever in ugly fashion. This leads one to suspect that the upper floor has been extended on the left, perhaps through the walling in of a sleeping porch or a simple extension of the walls to the level of the first floor plan. This explains the regrettable lack of windows in that part of the second floor, and the unexpected failure of the ribbon of windows, which is the glory of the second floor, to achieve a symmetrical termination on the left side of that room.

The McAlesters' description of this house, based on a pre-remodel observation, helps:

"A handsome symmetrical Prairie-style design, this has distinctive horizontal lines formed by rows of upright (soldier course) bricks.  Early photos show that the original shingle roof also had a horizontal motif.  The width of the house is exaggerated by including the sleeping porch under the main roof.  The use of a different material for the upper third of the house is a typical Prairie feature, as is the distinctive low arch with horizontal wings used in the entry-porch roof." [Incidentally, they wrongly give the address as 1930 B street, not C street.]

From this description, I'd guess that the horizontal clapboard cladding on the ground level is covering up the soldier courses of bricks--naturally, because the addition would never have been able to be built with a convincing extension of the brick of the main body, whereas just creating wooden cladding de novo cancelled the whole problem. I believe that the unhappy extension of the walls of the second story are making an interior space of the old sleeping porch, and I gravely fear those walls contain a snazzy new bathroom and a self-indulgent walk-in closet. If we press the McAlesters' description of the house as symmetrical, the added room on the east side of the house at ground level must be another product of the remodeling, and its eastern exposure suggests that it is a breakfast/dining room. The extension of the clapboard siding in the wall would thus serve as a means of privacy for the owners.

But for all the clumsy remodelling which has spoiled much of the original effect, the house is nevertheless worth seeing as a fine specimen of the breed; certainly an owner has the right to adapt a house to his needs, but I wish owner and architect had had as great an abundance of sensitivity and taste as the owner evidently had of cash to carry this expensive addition through.