Spanish Colonial Revival
Dallas Eclectic Architecture
This style developed in the areas Spain colonized, which included Florida and the Southwest. Buildings in the Spanish Colonial style were still being built in the 1800s, but by the late 1800s Victorian and Beaux Arts style eclectic homes came to the forefront. The resurgence of Spanish Colonial architecture came not from the historical precedence in Texas, but was imported from the architectural movement in California. Spanish architecture was celebrated at the San Diego Panama – California Exposition in 1915. Spanish architecture and its elements were then extensively used well into the 1920s.
Two of the most prominent Dallas architectural firms, Clifford Hutsell and Fooshee and Cheek were inspired by works found in Beverly Hills. Schutt & Scott, who designed the DeGolyer Estate in a Spanish Colonial style, were from California. Fooshee and Cheek, in anticipation of designing Highland Park Village, went with Highland Park developer Hugh Prather to see the source material and design of this style at the Barcelona World Exposition. They came back and in 1931 designed the nation’s first self-contained shopping center, Highland Park Village, in a Spanish Colonial Revival style. It set the architectural tone for Highland Park. You can see many of Fooshee and Cheek’s designed homes clustered on Beverly close to Douglas. In the late 1990s this style continued with Beverly Hills architect Richard Robertson III designing a home on Beverly across from the Country Club that seems to have always been there.
Still, in Highland Park, and more prevalently, in Lakewood, where there have been fewer tear downs, you see wonderful examples of Spanish Eclectic architecture with brightly colored tile roofs, elaborate chimney tops, ornately carved reliefs by the doors, balconies covered by the main roof, arched windows, wind walls and the occasional exterior staircase to the second floor.
4200 Beverly Drive, Dallas, Texas
This Spanish Eclectic Grand Mission style home is one of many that Marion Fooshee and James Cheek designed on Beverly Drive in Highland Park. This home they built for the Sterrettes in 1921 was widely successful.
