by Dianne McDonough on January 31, 2010

A tribute to the genius of famed architects Harrie T. Lindeberg and John F. Staub, this classical Georgian-style estate constructed in the 1920s is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Nestled in the cultural environment of the Museum District, Rice University and The Texas Medical Center, this home, with gated street and drive, is surrounded by approximately 1.7 acres of heavily wooded grounds enhanced by formal gardens and a quiet, serene pool area and pool house constructed in 2002, and completed with a picturesque carriage house with quarters.

Inside, a magnificent entrance hall is the overture to a stunning living room, a banquet-sized dining room, a handsome library and a breathtaking garden room. The gourmet kitchen offers a breakfast room, caterers’ kitchen & morning room for gathering. Two staircases ascend to the private family area. A gracious master bedroom suite offers comfort and privacy with a luxurious bath and his-her studies.

Recaputuring the style and grace of a by-gone era, this magnificently restored estate becons to the most discriminating.

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Country Houses of John F. Staub

by Dianne McDonough on January 31, 2010

This book about the country houses of Houston architect John F. Staub seeks to go beyond the discourse of style as a way to understand and evaluate architecture. Le Corbusier’s assertion in 1923 that “the ’styles’ are a lie” bespoke the frustration of several generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural reformers with a system of knowledge that privileged what, in practice, seemed most superficial and interchangeable about modern buildings: the historical sources on whichtheir compositional and decorative attributes were modeled.

John F. Staub, a twentieth-century American eclectic architect, had a long and distinguished career designing modern houses based on historical models, precisely the sort of buildings that his near contemporary Le Corbusier sought to dismiss. The guiding thesis of this book is not that the styles are a lie but that they were only part of the crucial architectural task in which John Staub, his eclectic peers, and their predecessors were involved: the social construction through architecture of upper-class-ness.

This book analyzes the ways Staub’s country houses sociaIIy constructed upper-class “identity” (identity involves the formation of community around shared beliefs and claims to belonging) and sought to sustain upper-class “subjects” (subjects are idealized personifications of identity positions) from the 1920S through the 1950s.2 This interpretation seeks to demonstrate that the practices associated with architectural design-site planning and spatial organization, massing and composition, building finishes and details, as weII as the application of stylewere the material media through which Staub advanced the social construction of upper-class identity and subjectivity. 

The perceptible beauty of Staub’s country houses was meant to sustain mythic identities that legitimized his clients’ social standing, linked them to other elites in a process of mutual reinforcement, and edified and inspired them to become upper-class subjects by internalizing the mythical virtues and manners imputed to the highest order of social classification: integrity, courage, wisdom, generosity, grace, and charrn.!   This book examines the social construction through architecture of the upper-class representational style that the social historian Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. categorizes as “patrician.  Analysis will demonstrate how the sense of style these houses, as objects, “materialized” (that is, made materially tangible), constructed an identity for, and lent cohesion to Houston’s entrepreneurial elite in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

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