CREATING A JEWEL
Rice Design Alliance tour homes showcase architecture and craftsmanship
Step just a few feet inside the West University Place home of Dr. Richard and Deborah Harper and you know you’re going to have an interesting visit.
The foyer is clad in the same white oak that makes up cabinets in the kitchen and bathrooms. To one side is a dining room filled with classic Thos. Moser furniture, special natural lighting set in the ceiling to highlight the room’s art, which includes numerous audubon prints and an original Albert Bierstadt painting.
Across the way is a small library, custom-made bookshelves filled with all kinds of books — including some on his hobby, mountain climbing — and art niches holding the result of another hobby, woodcarving.
The Indiana limestone on part of the home’s exterior repeats in the living room, surrounding the fireplace and running up a wall, laid with precision. That’s the single word that best describes the goal of the Harpers and their architect, Leslie Davidson of L. Barry Davidson Archiects: precision.
“I’m a neurosurgeon, and I love craftsmanship,” said Richard Harper, 72, who works at the Neurosurgical Group of Texas. “To the casual eye, you don’t pay much attention to it, but this is extremely high-level stuff. (The masons and bricklayers) are so damn good, it’s mesmerizing to watch them.”
Davidson had designed their previous home, a 6,500-squarefoot beauty nearby on Brompton that was featured on a number of home tours.
Their newer home is downsized a bit — it’s 4,500 square feet — since their children are grown and they want less to take care of. It’s on a home tour, too, the Rice Design Alliance’s annual architecture tour that’s Saturday-April 8, themed “Balance: Celebrating Women in Design.”
Each year’s tour has a different theme. Last year’s featured homes and buildings in floodplains and ran months before anyone uttered the words “Hurricane Harvey.” The decision to feature the work of female architects was made even before the #MeToo movement began, so their timing is lucky two years in a row.
“I think that women are very attuned to what makes the house work. I think we’re the more domestic partner, usually. There are exceptions to the rule, of course and there are a lot of men that cook,” Davidson said when asked how a woman’s architectural perspective might differ. “I think you bring a feeling about storage, a feeling about containment, and how the family works. I think that most women architects are very concerned about family life and how to give their clients an environment so that everybody can be the best that they can be.”
Photographer Jacki Schaefer, a co-chair of this year’s tour, said the women’s theme was meant to shake things up a bit.
“The Rice Design Alliance runs into the problem that there are several great architects who get featured in tours frequently, people you see over and over again. That’s great, but there are all these other people doing great work,” Schaefer said. “We wanted to step out of the box a little to showcase people who don’t get attention.”
The six tour buildings are homes designed by Natalye Appel, Kristin Schuster, Florence Tang, Leslie Barry Davidson and Vivi Robertson as well as the Transart Foundation, designed by Surpik Angelini. This year’s tour includes an app, which provides audio curation at each location.
Schaefer said there will be other events — not yet scheduled — focusing on women in the profession and why so many attend architecture school but leave the profession.
“We make up 20 percent of the industry — and that’s an AIA statistic — but if you look at the architecture schools’ student bodies, it was 75 percent women when I matriculated,” said Schaefer, a Rice University graduate. “Why is this happening and what can we do to support women? What is causing them to drop out of the profession, and why are they going into other things?”
Davidson jokes that she’s a bit OCD when it comes to the details of her designs, but Richard Harper says her attention to every little detail is why he hired her a second time. Creating the home, she worked with him more on the structure and millwork, and more closely with Deborah Harper, a private school administrator, on the interior finishes such as lighting, counters and tile.
The Harpers’ home is a combination of traditional and contemporary architecture, but the linear feel of Prairie-style millwork is unmistakable. You’ll see it in the custom baseboards and crown moulding, impeccable kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and trim that charm.
Some of the flooring is creamy travertine, but many rooms are covered in vintage French oak laid cabin miter style, a series of concentric squares. A dynamic vaulted ceiling in the main living area is covered in white oak, and a gorgeous architectural chandelier hangs from the center. A smaller version of that ceiling was installed in the unpretentious master bedroom.
“Deborah wanted a kitchen that opens to where everyone is, and I wanted beautiful wood and stone work,” Richard Harper said. “I hope that people who visit think, right away, ‘Wow, there’s real craftsmanship here.’ ”