Lovable Place No. 2

Simply put… Home.  What is there not to love about white clinker brick, steel windows, slate roof, old towering oak trees and whistling radiators, all filled with children laughing and lots of love.  Living in a “lovable old home” there is much I gripe about, but in the end my affection for it always wins out.

The home is a simple arts-and-crafts inspired English Tudor built by a father-son/builder-architect team in 1927.  The concept is classic Tudor: side facing gable ends with a single dominant front facing gable, and of course, the well proportioned entry turret.  It is on an up-hill site,  has a wonderful walled courtyard in the back to retain the terrain above.   Some fascinating details include the use of teak wood for the interior paneling and trim, no interior wood casings on the windows, self-supporting precast concrete spiral stairs, and no exposed exterior wood – truly a low maintenance home.

The architect (the son) Edwin Peckinpaugh was 24 years old when he designed the home, a recent graduate of Penn University.  He went on to design some of our city’s great homes before moving to Sacramento, CA in the 1940’s – he was a real talent.   You can read more about Edwin at the now Stafford King and Wiese Architects.

Candoro Entrance

Garage

This little gem can be found in the small community of Vestal just across the river from downtown Knoxville. It was designed in 1923 by Charles Barber.

We are inspired by its simplistic beauty. The building has total command of its site. Look at the view down the entrance road through the alley of cedar trees, what an amazing, formal entry! The garage to the side is more of a Mediterranean style, while the front facade is Classical, yet they blend well. The intricate details in the stonework show that this came from the shop of some very skilled craftsmen.

The regulating lines below show that a great amount of thought went into the facade. Two overlapping golden rectangles form the main body. Inset between the watertable and the base of the cornice are two perfect squares. The windows are golden rectangles, as well as the space between the columns. One often wonders just how much of this was planned and how much was designers intuition. Either way it is beautiful.

Regulating Lines

Interestingly, the name is not of Italian origin as one could easily assume since this was a marble company. According to the Knoxville MPC:

The name came from the first letters of the last names of its founders, John J. Craig, F. C. Anderson, W. J. Donaldson and S. A. Rodgers.

Dulin House, Knoxville, Tennessee

This little known and easily missed house located at 3100 Kingston Pike comes from the studio of one of the most famous residential architects to design a house built in Knoxville.  The Dulin House was designed in 1915 by John Russell Pope (1874-1937), a prominent architect from New York.  Pope’s main focus in practice was residential, but he completed a number of commercial and public buildings throughout the Northeast, including the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art.

The Dulin House closely resembles Pope’s first residential commission, the Jacobs Residence, located in Newport, Rhode Island. Interestingly, the Dulin House was the original home of what is now known as the Knoxville Museum of Art. The museum, formerly the Dulin Gallery of Art, was founded by Mary Katherine Dulin Folger and was housed there from 1961 to the late 1980’s.  The 10 year span between Popes work on the Jacobs Residence and Dulin Residence reveals a maturing architect who was refining his style we might now refer to as modern classicism.

The Jacobs Residence, Rhode Island

Pope graduated from Columbia University in 1894 and also studied for three years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He traveled extensively in Europe during this time and gained his love of Classicism.

Reference: James B. Garrison. Mastering Tradition: The Residential Architecture of John Russell Pope. New York: Acanthus, 2004.