Masterpiece of Greenway Parks

5530 Wenonah Drive, Dallas, Texas

Architect Fonzi Robertson Designed Home – Not Yet on Market

Architect Fonzie Robertson designed this Greenway Parks masterpiece in 1928 in an English style. It was an elegant and grand home then, and remains so today. With 5,500 square feet, sited on .53 acres of land, and enhanced by the Greenway private park behind it, 5530 Wenonah was distinguished from the beginning.

To put in perspective the monumental quality and architectural definition of this home, think about this: Greenway Parks was approximately the same size as Munger Place, where Swiss Avenue was the grandest street in Dallas, yet Greenway Parks was not another conventional subdivision. It was a new and innovative private-park-plan neighborhood of approximately 300 homes, created on 150 acres, with 27% of the land dedicated to parks, parkways, boulevards, and streets.

Homes on Swiss Avenue costing a minimum of $10,000 in 1905 helped define the ambition of that neighborhood and by the 1920s the grandest new homes on Swiss Avenue were often selling for $30,000. The developers of Greenway Parks were able to set the minimum price of a home at $12,500. Yet 5530 Wenonah, one of the earliest homes built in Greenway Parks — the 24th home — cost $50,000 in 1928.

The $50,000 price tells us how important this home was from the beginning. It was one of the defining homes of Greenway Parks. An extended lot allowed the home to stretch 109 feet across the site, giving it a presence rarely found among Dallas’s finest homes. Even when most wealthy families had just one car, this English-style home had a garage that large enough to accommodate four cars.

The rooms were open and are scaled to today’s standard. The home has five bedrooms and four bathrooms as well as two additional bedrooms and one bathroom over the garage. Its original living room remains 31 feet by 21 feet. Immense stone mantels and fireplaces in both the living room and dining room contribute to the grandeur and architectural character of the home. Elaborate carved detail is found throughout the home. The extraordinary width of the house allows generous square footage, with much of the home only one room deep, allowing sunlight to illuminate the home from three directions.

Architectural Detail and Delineation

This Tudor Revival home, reminiscent of an English manor house, benefits architecturally from two things. First, there is extraordinary architectural detail shown in the chimneys, doors, arches, trim, brick and stonework, and windows that are beautifully composed to create a graceful architectural façade.

Second, the home benefits from a double front façade. One sees the front façade from Wenonah Drive. And then one sees a front façade from the private parkway behind the home. Both façades were designed to be viewed and enjoyed.

Value of the Home

The last extended lot of this size backed up to the Greenway sold for approximately $4.4 million. The size of this lot is rare and every time a home is torn down, the value of a lot this size becomes even more valuable.

This Fonzi Robertson architect-designed home has a size and architecture that gives it immense value today. The cost of renovating this home will be a fraction of the cost of building a new home. Whether one assigns $100 per square foot or $200 per square foot to the existing structure, the total cost of the structure and renovation will be far lower than the cost of building a new home. And the result will have much more prestige, presence and prominence than new construction.