Jenifer McNeil Baker, who roamed the 10-acre property at sunset to photograph 3201 Wendover for the Lakewood home tour says, “I was mostly surprised at how on trend the entire house still is. Many of the original features of the home feel just as modern today.” Photo by Jenifer McNeil Baker
One of our March stories focused on the second owners of the Lakewood house O’Neil Ford designed in 1939. Alfred and Juanita Bromberg commissioned the design and lived in the house on Wendover the rest of their lives — Juanita Bromberg until she died in 1999 at the age of 96.
Dan Patterson and his late wife, Gail, bought the house in 2000 from the Brombergs’ children. Our story focused on the history of the land and house, the Pattersons’ restoration of the home and re-assemblage of the acreage, and the future of this 10-acre respite in the middle of suburban Lakewood and urban Dallas.
Several stories have been written, however, on the house itself and all of its unique architectural features. Our favorite, a 2014 story from the erstwhile Dallas Morning News fashion magazine FD Luxe, is no longer available online, but here are a few others, for readers interested in more:
D Magazine listed the home under the header of “modernism” in a 1999 story that traced the “family tree” of Dallas’ significant homes. It’s described as a “Texas modern home” on real estate broker Douglas Newby’s “Significant Homes” site, which profiles dozens of Dallas residences. And David Dillon, the late architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, describes it on pages 41-42 of his book, “The Architecture of O’Neil Ford: Celebrating Place.”
The Dallas Observer in 2004 questioned a tax break the City of Dallas awarded to the Pattersons for restoring the house. That same year, Dillon wrote a “lost and found” DMN piece contrasting “a superb Howard Meyer house in Highland Park … demolished because of soaring land prices and no preservation plan,” and 3201 Wendover, “an equally significant O’Neil Ford house in Lakewood … making a graceful transition to the 21st century because a buyer and a seller understood its cultural value and joined hands to save it.” (Reading the article requires accessing NewsBank files through the Dallas Public Library website.)
Just last December, the Dallas Morning News’ Robert Wilonsky wrote about the destruction of an O’Neil Ford home in Highland Park, one of three O’Neil Ford-designed houses that had been demolished since 2013 in the Park Cities, “where houses designed by O’Neil Ford are treated like disposable products meant to be disassembled and discarded,” Wilonsky seethed.
Lakewood resident Karen Eubank profiled the Bromberg house in her home tour profile for Candy’s Dirt last fall, noting that Lakewood neighbors know it as “the house behind the LOLA — the Lakewood Outdoor Learning Area, a program at Lakewood Elementary School. Every child in the neighborhood knows they are not to cross the creek behind the LOLA to the private 10-acre property.”
And of course, if you really want to nerd out, read all of the intricate and intimate details in the home’s City of Dallas Landmark nomination form and its application to be added to the National Historic Register.
