One of the comments on today’s POTD was about the busy (gaudy?) roof-line of the house. That spawned a whole train of thought in regard to why I like this particular house (waif in the window or not), including the roof-line, so I thought I’d go through it here for fun.
Back when the design for our mountain house was little more than a gleam in the corner of my eye, I happened to read Richard Brautigan’s novel The Hawkline Monster. The cover of the book looked like this:
Given we were wanting to design our house to be sort of a neo-Victorian design, we were really drawn to this image. Note that the complicated roofline and the lightning rods and other roof attachments shows a remarkable similarity to the house in today’s POTD, shown again here:
I would have build a house just like the Hawkline Mansion on the book cover–except that very real money, time, skill, and size constraints, as well as general inclination, scaled down the look considerably. But, except for the roof-line fixtures, you can perhaps see the book cover’s influence on our result here:
At some point in the design of the house, when I was still researching Victorian designs, I stumbled across this 1930s photo by Russell Lee from the depression era archives of the Farm Home Administration:
Clearly the cover of the Hawkline Monster was painted based on the photo of this house, complete with the roof accoutrements (again similar to the waif house in today’s POTD). One year I was going down to Wichita Falls, Texas for an exhibit opening of some of my photography and realized I was going to be near Comanche, Texas where this photo was taken. So I took a side trip there to look for the house. Comanche is a small town, but I drove all around the place and could not find it. Finally, I stopped into the local library and talked to the head (only?) librarian there and she knew all about the house, except that she’d never seen the painting on the book cover. She told me the place was torn down sometime after the end of WWII, but she told me exactly where to find the location.
When I got to the corner where the house used to be, there was an architecturally uninspiring house from the 1950s or 60s. I did see this partial fence around the lot which I imagine was part of the original build:
I was pretty disappointed in the house being torn down so long ago, but I did get a bit of a feel for the old neighborhood by looking at the house across the street:
So that’s a roundabout story of roof-lines and home designs. But if you think the roof-lines of the waif house and the Hawkline Mansion are busy consider this photo of the roof-line of a building in Venice, Italy that I took back in 2008:
