Storybook Master

By Arrol Gellner

The whimsical Storybook Style homes of the 1920s -- also known as Hansel and Gretel, Disneyesque and Romance Revival -- were among the most charming and creative of the 20th century. Most were one-of-a-kind designs by masters such as William R. Yelland and Carr Jones, but a good number of Storybook Style housing tracts were also built across the country. The man behind the very best of them was an obscure architect from Oakland, California named Walter W. Dixon.

Like many before him, Dixon traveled to Europe during the Teens to study classical architecture. Unlike most, however, he was less fascinated by ancient monuments than by the rural designs of the countryside. He studied the vernacular architecture of Normandy, and upon his return to the United States began designing small homes that set out to capture the quaintness and sense of history of those rural French dwellings.

The resulting designs were distinguished by medievalizing features such as turrets, half-timbering, and stone trim. Dixon became a master at using scaled-down embellishments such as dovecotes and dormers to give his small houses a rambling look. As a contemporary source put it, they included -the little features that suggest and give the character and feeling of the larger, more expensive home.

An unusually capable self-promoter, Dixon published a popular book of plans for small homes, and also established a plan service to provide builders with stock blueprints. His designs were used in three of the most notable Storybook Style tracts extant, all of them in the San Francisco Bay area, and all three showing considerable innovation in planning and construction.

The earliest of these bore the evocative name of Normandy Gardens and was constructed between 1925 and 1926 by contractor R. C. Hillen, who built more than three hundred homes to Dixon's plans over the course of his career. The tract's focal point is an apartment house built to resemble a castle, with houses flanking it on either side. The layout was patterned on that of a medieval Norman village, with its manor house surrounded by cottages -- a romantic notion with the practical benefit of combining single-family and multi-family dwellings in an architecturally cohesive manner.

In 1926, Dixon designed the homes for Stonehenge, a unique tract in Alameda, California developed by one Christopher Columbus Howard. Here, a series of two-story half-timbered cottages were arranged in a U-shape around a superbly landscaped central court; while the garages were tucked away at the rear of the homes and accessed by a separate service alley.

In the late 20s, contractor Ernest W. Urch (-Builder of Modest Mansions) called upon Dixon for another Storybook Style tract on Oakland's Ross Street. The resulting homes shine with a sense of architectural unity enlivened by playful variations in detail. Ross Street was also among the earliest developments to feature underground utilities, a fact that adds immeasurably to its appeal. Lamentably, a portion of the tract was destroyed by freeway construction during the 1960s, making it difficult to appreciate the original impact its delightful streetscape.

By the early Thirties, homes such as Dixon's were being built across America. But while the Great Depression didn't really hurt the Storybook Style's popularity, the rise of more -serious Modernist styles did. By the eve of World War II, mock-medieval homes were embarrassingly out of fashion, and demand for whimsical work such as Dixon's dried up.

But wasn't it a joy while it lasted.