The creation of Texas Modern style is credited to legendary architect O’Neil Ford and his mentor David Williams, and draws inspiration from none other than Frank Lloyd Wright.
“O’Neil Ford helped launch Texas architecture on a new path by showing that its roots were deep and often beautiful,” Dallas Morning News architecture critic David Dillon wrote in his 1999 book The Architecture of O’Neil Ford.
“He was born on the frontier and be longed to the last generation of American architects with genuine ties to the land — an agrarian and a Jeffersonian who chose a T-square over a bull-tongue plow. His small-town roots made him pragmatic and healthily skeptical, and thereby saved his architecture from becoming decorative or self-indulgent.”
Courtesy Denton Public Library/University of North Texas Libraries
His sturdy structures always utilized brick, glass, and wood, and were brilliantly attuned to their physical settings.
Ford’s work is well represented on various Texas university campuses. He designed most of the University of Dallas campus in Irving; Braniff Memorial Tower, the Braniff Graduate Center, the Gorman Lecture Center, the Haggar University Center, and the Haggerty Science Building. He also designed the Little Chapel in the Woods on the TWU campus and many other buildings in Denton.
His home base of San Antonio is well-covered in his work: the renovation of La Villita, the campus of Trinity University, the campus of Saint Mary’s Hall, the University of Texas at San Antonio Main Campus, and the Tower of the Americas.
He also created buildings for Skidmore College in upstate New York and for Texas Instruments. Ford completed the design of the building of the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville in the Texas Hill Country, shortly before his death in 1982.
While commercial buildings were his forte, he designed several homes in Dallas — magnificent specimens of modern architecture. From the Daltxrealestate archives, here are three examples that’ll leave an impression with you, I guarantee.
Lakewood Home Tour Features Historic Texas Modern by O’Neil Ford
Address: 3201 Wendover Road in Dallas
If you live in Lakewood, you’ll know it as the house behind the LOLA — the Lakewood Outdoor Learning Area. Originally the Metzler Dairy Farm, the Wendover home was considered to be in the suburbs when the Brombergs built it in 1939.
Ford and Arch Swank built the 5,500-square-foot home with ventilation in mind and created two exposures in every room, so there was no existing central air or heat. The home was cooled with attic fans and heated by seven fireplaces, handcrafted by Ford’s brother Lynn, a woodworker.
Of course, each fireplace has a story. The living room surround was designed after a bracelet that owner Mrs. Juanita Bromberg loved and the dining room fireplace was created to match her Wedgewood china pattern.
There are four bedrooms and five bathrooms in the house with clever built-ins everywhere. An original telephone seating area is on the second floor and of course plenty of screened porches and balconies, a Ford trademark.
— See more photos and read more about 3201 Wendover Road, featured in the 2016 Lakewood Home Tour.
The Penson Estate, a Family’s Dream Home
Address: 3756 Armstrong Parkway
This one’s a heartbreaker.
Located on the delicious juncture of two magnificent Highland Park streets, Armstrong and Overhill, this 8,900-square-foot O’Neil Ford creation has been a one-family home since it was commissioned in 1954 by Nancy and John “Jack” Penson.
The day it sold at an estate auction for $4.95 million to auto dealership magnate Lute Riley, Candy Evans spoke to one of the Penson children, Read Penson Gendler, about her parents’ dream home.
“They never talked about moving,” Gendler said in September 2016. “Both said they would go out of that house feet first.”
Candy asked Gendler if the unthinkable happens, is she prepared?
“Yes,” says Read. “I told my sister, in a way, this is our house and always will be the way our parents built it, and how our family lived there. If someone else tears it down, now, then we will have been the only ones — no one else gets to live there.”
Are you starting to feel that knot in your stomach?
As one of Ford’s largest homes he designed in Dallas on a 0.89 acre lot, the estate was named by Preservation Dallas as one of the major buildings in danger of demolition.
Now, Dallas has historic and conservation districts that protect historic structures, but there is no equivalent in the Park Cities. A property owner in the Park Cities can demolish a residence that has stood for decades, sometimes even a century or more, without any review, other than requiring a demolition permit.
And that’s what happened. It was torn down on a Tuesday in December, and Riley later sold the lot.
— See more photos and read more about the demise of 3756 Armstrong Parkway, and a possible happy ending.
Is This The Most Important O’Neil Ford Midcentury Modern Home in Texas?
Address: 5455 Northbrook Drive in Dallas
Preservation Dallas deemed this home to be one of O’Neil Ford’s most important designs in Texas. Why? See above.
Ford sited this Northbrook beauty on a terraced 1.77-acre lake lot in the Dentwood Addition of Old Preston Hollow. The interior shines with a rare indoor pool and intricate woodwork by O’Neil’s brother, Lynn.
This Northbrook home was designed for the Haggerty family in 1958. Patrick Haggerty was one of the founders of Texas Instruments, and it’s been a hot property since it was completed — featured in books, magazines, and newspapers. It’s also been the site of countless lectures and social gatherings — if walls could talk!
— See more of 5455 Northbrook Drive, listed in October 2019 for $5.6 million.
