Texas Architect

Menil House

PROJECT Menil House Renovation and Conservation, Houston
CLIENT Menil Foundation
ARCHITECT Stern and Bucek Architects
DESIGN TEAM William F. Stern, FAIA; David C. Bucek, Jr., AIA; Daniel Hall
CONTRACTOR R.B. Ratcliff & Associates
CONSULTANTS Haynes Whaley (structural); Walter P Moore (civil); CHPA (MEP); Jane Anderson Curtis (landscape); Hilary Crady (fabric and furnishings); Source Design (paint); Ellen Beasley (architectural historian); Michael Hardin (roofing)
PHOTOGRAPHER Hester + Hardaway

The house Philip Johnson designed for John and Dominique de Menil in the Briarwood subdivision introduced the International Style to Houston's opulent and architecturally conservative River Oaks neighborhood. The high-profile house, completed in 1951, helped to spur interest in the new, minimalist, post-war architecture engendered by Mies van der Rohe, providing opportunities for a generation of talented young architects that included Howard Barnestone, Harwood Taylor, Anderson Todd and Hugo Neuhaus to season the domestic landscape of the culturally nascent city.

Thanks to a methodical $3.3 million restoration undertaken by the Menil Foundation, this landmark of Houston's domestic architecture has been brought back to life by Houston's Stern and Bucek Architects, not simply as Johnson designed it, but as the Menils lived in it.

Johnson was finishing work on the much more iconic glass house he was building for himself in New Canaan, Conn., when he began his work for the Menils. His design - a one-story, flat-roofed, 5,600-square-foot house - comprised a long, central rectangle with a large, inset outdoor garden court around which the living spaces of the house were organized in an open plan. A block of bedrooms for the family's children was attached to the back and a service extension with kitchen, laundry, and carport projected to the west. The singular feature of the house is the 160-foot-long brick wall on the front of the house broken only by a three-panel glass entryway and two double-pane horizontal awning windows that admit natural light into the kitchen. Johnson assiduously sited the house on the wooded three-lot property, setting it back from San Felipe Road and thus giving it a serene, leafy natural enclosure.

Unlike the absolute Platonic purity of his glass house, the Menil house was more a hybrid both in its construction and its formal composition. The Menils came at the architect with a complex program that frequently changed and included accommodating a growing art collection and the need to accommodate parties for the international cadre of cultural and political figures whom the Menils cultivated. The client's agenda could be sometimes complex and ambiguous, asking for the high style of the East Coast cultural elite while cautioning against ostentation and rigid formalism. Even more contrary, Dominique de Menil didn't intend to suppress her own eclectic tastes in art, furniture and decoration. Johnson had predictably recommended using Miesian furniture to finish out the seamless aesthetic he had in mind, but she turned the job of completing the interiors over to Charles James, a New York fashion designer known for his sculpted ball gowns and lavish fabrics, and whose tastes and sensibilities couldn't have been more different from the modernist party line. James, in his only foray into designing domestic interiors, provided counterpointal quirkiness. As might be expected, Johnson was not impressed. He remained unenthusiastic about the house and was reluctant to have it photographed or published.

The Menils later undertook two alterations to the house - converting two bays of the carport into offices for their art collection and adding a billowy canvas canopy mounted on the roof to cover the garden courtyard.

Following Dominque de Menil's death in 1997, the house passed to the Menil Foundation Board of Trustees who elected to restore it and preserve its cultural significance. Working with Stern and Bucek and an extensive team of consultants, the trustees set a goal of conserving the house and its legacy, respecting and maintaining it as it was lived in and the intentional changes made over time. There would be no attempt to recover the original intentions of the architect or to pare the house back to the way it was when first occupied.

Years of neglect and deferred maintenance had resulted in some serious problems, including roof leaks, deteriorating window frames and hardware, old wiring and plumbing, and the plaster ceiling showed considerable damage and staining. With the goal of disturbing the house as little as possible, the architects devised ingenious strategies for hiding their work. Certain walls with their original paint intact were designated as "sacred walls" and were left untouched while those that had been repainted were given new coats of fresh paint exactly matched to the topmost or latest layer. Selected walls that had been covered with fabric, much of it antique velvet, were also preserved or replaced with custom dyed materials. To achieve a precise match of the fabric, the architects consulted with Anne Coleman, a Charles James scholar and former curator of fabrics and textiles at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Having decided to replace the ceiling because of damage from roof leaks, the architects were able to install the new wiring in the ceiling cavity. However, asbestos was found in the acoustical layer of plaster, which needed to be abated - an operation that would introduce moisture and threaten the walls. Simply covering them with protective sheets was deemed inadequate since it might produce a destructive build up of mold and mildew, so the architects had cavity walls constructed around the protected surfaces through which dry air could be circulated from remote dehumidifiers. The scheme worked and the surfaces were undamaged. While the ceiling cavity was exposed, new plumbing lines and roof drains were installed. And because the roof-mounted canopy had been the source of water penetration, a new support system was designed and installed that anchored the canopy frame to the internal steel frame of the house without penetrating the roof membrane.

Some of the floor-to-ceiling cypress window frames had significant rot damage and were repaired or replaced entirely. Also, all the large glass was replaced with tempered glass to meet new safety requirements. A new drainage plan for the three-acre site will ensure that ground water damage to the house will no longer be a problem. And, guided by vintage photographs, landscape architect Jane Curtis restored the semi-tropical garden courtyard.

The finishes are simple - utilitarian three-tab shingles for exterior cladding that mimic the texture of the trees' bark and aluminum pivoting windows and doors. Projecting screen boxes allow the pivoting windows to open freely in the direction of prevailing breezes. The cabin interiors are all faced in clear finished MDF, which brings a luminosity and texture like leather, further completing the sense that one is in a camp, a tent really. Linoleum floors and fir cabinetry contrast with the simple palette and assume a luster and warmth but doesn't detract from the focus on the windows and views.

The architects produced over 50 architectural and technical drawings for the restoration, but the project involved an equal amount of scholarship. In the end, the careful restoration pays homage to the importance of mid-century modern buildings in Houston's architectural heritage. It also recognizes the leading role that the Menils played in advancing Houston's culture.

--Bruce C. Webb is a professor in the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston.