It’s the house you can’t ignore — so how did such a modern home get built smack dab in our neighborhood?
Rows of brick houses and quaint cottages line the streets of Lakewood Heights. So when a mid-century modern appeared on the corner of Vickery and Alderson, the neighbors couldn’t help but take notice.
“I don’t think you can be neutral about the house,” says owner Reinhard Ziegler. “I love that people have the opportunity to form an opinion instead of driving by and never really noticing.”
It’s definitely the kind of house that prompts a double take, but Ziegler and his wife, Lori Lovelace, never intended it as a statement. They built the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home based on how they wanted to live. The couple previously resided in a California contemporary in Merriman Park, but after they adopted their daughter, Halyna, a couple of years ago, it became apparent that the home’s footprint was too small.
Plus Ziegler, an accomplished photographer, wanted a studio closer to home than the Oak Cliff location to which he had traveled for 15 years. So they set out to accommodate both needs, and quickly discovered that renovating an existing home would be difficult and costly.
“We really did look, literally, all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area, even as far west as Flower Mound and Argyle,” Ziegler says.
In the end, they settled on a corner lot with its crepe myrtle grove and majestic red oak — “an absolute calling card for the property,” he says. They broke ground in January 2005 after tearing down a building contaminated with toxic mold.
“We certainly didn’t feel badly about pushing that over,” Ziegler says.
And, though he adds he has a huge appreciation for architectural preservation — he helped renovate an early 1900s home in Oak Cliff’s Winnetka Heights a few years ago — he’s also “a bit of a student of how cities renew themselves over time.”
“This neighborhood was undergoing change whether we moved here or not,” he says, “so we decided to create a structure that would be of fine quality and elegant design. From there on, it’s a matter of taste.”
To design the house, they sought the expertise of Rob Civitello, a faculty member at the University of Houston’s architecture college. His approach was a three-box design, “almost like you took Legos and made three different boxes and stacked them,” Ziegler says.
The stacking design naturally shades the house, creating cantilevers —long projections common in Wright-esque architecture — where the master suite, upstairs hallway and west balcony overhang the first floor. The design also incorporates other typical aspects of mid-century modern homes, such as the floor to ceiling built-in cabinetry, large windows that act as walls and make the most of sunlight, and a balance with natural elements, such as the purple box on the west side of the house that complements the crepe myrtles.
Ziegler and Lovelace took years to formulate this dream house — collecting tearsheets of ideas they liked, doodling designs on restaurant napkins — and were intricately involved in the building process.
Ziegler estimates he spent one to three hours a day on site during the 16 months of construction, donning the hardhat of co-architect and co-project manager. Unlike the McMansions dotting Vickery and other nearby streets, whose builders use similar materials and follow preconceived floor plans, there was no precursor for this house. So Ziegler worked closely with the subcontractors to share the family’s vision.
He’s definitely attached to the end result, pointing out distinctions such as the five-by-eight-foot sliding doors on the girls’ rooms (the couple is planning to adopt another daughter from Kazakstan soon), which are actually giant magnetic whiteboards.
“We gave Halyna a few magnets, and the guys had no more than installed it when she took all the drawings she had and pictures of her friends and immediately plastered the thing,” Ziegler laughs.
Lovelace, whose job sometimes requires global travel, wanted a house that was easy to come home to. So they built a dumbwaiter, allowing her to drop off clothes in the laundry room and send everything else upstairs without multiple trips. The house also has a mailbox that deposits into a hidden closet underneath the stairs — “so we can be gone for a long time and mail can just accumulate,” she says.
It’s these “silly things,” as Lovelace calls them, that make their home convenient. But the overarching vision was indoor-outdoor living, another component of mid-century modern design: “When you’re indoors, you feel like you’re outdoors, and the outdoors feels like part of the house,” Lovelace says.
So it was stroke of luck when the property next door became available right after they started building. On it stood a wood frame house that for years had been a rental property. Ziegler considered renovating it for his mother, but the cost to bring it up to current standards was “beyond what was reasonable.” So native grasses were planted in its place to surround the property’s existing live oak and pecan trees, and a misting system installed over the back porch brings down the temperature by 10 or 15 degrees, so no matter what time of year it is, they can take full advantage of their sprawling lawn.
Being an outdoors family has also allowed them to encounter neighbors jogging, walking dogs and pushing strollers. Passersby are usually quick to strike up conversation about the house, Ziegler says.
“Some people really have a genuine curiosity of ‘What were ya thinking?’ One guy who walked by just shook his head,” Ziegler laughs. “For some, this is not their cup of tea, and I understand that. But if people say the house doesn’t fit the neighborhood, by definition, a contemporary house never fits its neighborhood. You don’t easily encounter a neighborhood of contemporary homes,” he says.
Some neighbors, however, have welcomed the house as something fresh and even a little gutsy, Ziegler says.
And if any neighbors aren’t happy about it, he says, they’re keeping their opinions to themselves.
“Given that people in general are polite, the comments to our face are largely positive,” Ziegler smiles.
