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Home My Public Portal AboutArchitecture/9(6' /ca/I.9 >mar7 • ti.:c t t o; ou>pg�. ys'- ar Drake's Lodge was typical of rustic resorts that lured Idahoans in the 1920s Rustic, picturesque houses included log,timber elements _of picturesque cabins and hotels, built of logs and shingles, decorated with native materials. The racks of deer and elk and, elements clearly exposed in the structure, and natural rock from the site was used for Idaho Downing, a landscape architect; Swiss chalets were adapted to helped to promote the idea p By Arthur Hart p - p (still rural American settings, and were it �� share a blazing fire in a huge inn The American love of pictur- esque houses in picturesque set- tings, usually rustic, dates from massive the beginning of the 19th century. chimneys, fireplaces, porches and Yesterdays Writers like Andrew Jackson) foundations. popular) that a man's home was his castle, and that his "estate" surrounding it should be made beautiful with trees, shrubs, flow- ers and protective fences. The taste for picturesque archi- tecture was part of a larger ro- mantic movement in which a building was expected to have as- sociations with the past, with ex- otic far -away lands, or with some literary setting which made it in- teresting. Romantic architecture could be Greek, Moorish, Gothic, or Italian Renaissance, but in the 19th cen- tury, it was almost never utilitar- ian and straightforward or without historic ornament or form. . Because Downing stressed wooded settings, he often leaned toward cottages which seemed at r home in them. "Rustic" architec- tnrnftan inrhviprt Ina nr timhar especially appropriate models, was throught, for summer retreats or tourist hotels. Crooked limbs and natural tree forms were often used for porch posts and brackets, for rustic l'ences, and even for signs. Rustic names were spelled lout in twisted branches with the bark on, reading "Bide -a -Wee," "Dew Drop Inn," or "Seldom Inn." Idahoans began to build in the rustic taste when4the country was settled enough to make vacation cabins and resort hotels popular. Plenty of pioneer log cabins had been naturally rustic, but the ones we are talking about were deliber- ately and self-consciously so — not from necessity but from taste. The rustic building best known to Idahoans in the 1890s was the one which represented the new state at 'other native game animals we 'hung above doors and in gables. .Tourists could put up for the night Chicago in 1893. Of all the sta fireplace made of native stone, buildings at that great Workand delight in the contract be - Fair only Idaho's was a log cab.tµ,een.:the rustic life and the cities Made from cedar trees cut nethey had left behind for awhile. Cataldo Mission, the Idaho Bui: Drake's Lodge near Warm Lake ing was a combination Swiss Crwas one of a number of such his - let and a hunting lodge in appe4oric log inns which attracted mo- 'ance. It attracted much favorattorists from Boise Valley in the that even in architectural hite tural setting dominated 1920s. Deer and mountain sheep white classical revival tem heads decorated its massive pon- and palaces most Americans likderosa log porch posts, supplying part of the rustic flavor people en - the primitive brand of picturesBack in Idaho, improved trailoyed. rkr11�� rtation accounted for an (Arthur Hart is director of the ase in resort architecture aIdaho Historical Society.) summer cabins. As more and bet- ter roads were built, automobiles began to go everywhere. McCall and Warm Lake, within easy driv- ing distance of Boise, Nampa and Caldwell soon developed clusters r j f✓P lGfll�i0 I7-(4& /7,3 Fancy 1800s buildings came from mail-order catalogs By ARTHUR HART Victorian buildings in Idaho were often decorated with fancy cutout brackets, lacy gable orna- ments and turned finials. The nat- ural assumption made by most present-day viewers is that this was handwork, performed by local craftsmen. As a matter of fact, this was al- most never the case. With the ex- ception of Cataldo Mission, built and decorated by hand in the 1850s, our later 19th century build- ings are chiefly products of the In- dustrial Revolution — composed of elements made by machine. The Victorian "gingerbread" most people today find charming (or amusing) was turned out in quantity in woodworking facto- ries, using bandsaws, jigsaws, planers, jointers, lathes and a host of other machines. So effi- cient and rapid was this produc- tion that individual elements of decoration, no matter how or- nate, were sold for prices that are ridiculously low by today's stand- ards. Typically, these architectural elements were marketed by mail- order catalog. In forerunners of Idaho Yesterdays the Sweet's Catalogs used by American architects today, many 19th century manufacturers pro- duced catalogs of their own wares and incorporated those of other makers as well. A sash and door factory, for ex- ample, usually included window glass, fireplace grates and a va- riety of hardware in its catalog. This was a convenience to rural or small-town customers and turned an extra profit for the company. There were few professional architects in small-town America in the decades following the Civil War, and it would be 1900 before Idaho had even a half -dozen. Sev- eral thousand buildings were built here during that period, however, and some of them were quite styl- ish. How could a properous mer- chant in Boise City or Lewiston or Caldwell get plans for an up-to- date house in the absence of a local architect? The answer, of course, was from another catalog. Eastern and Midwestern architects pub- lished plans for every conceivable kind of structure in a series of pat- tern books available for an aver- age price of about $12. A.J. Bic- knell, a New York architect, was one of the most prolific of the pat- tern -book publishers. Between 1870 and 1886 he produced 10 dif- ferent volumes, several of which ran through more than one edi- tion. The example reproduced today is from another pattern book of the day. It depicts the then -fash- ionable Mansard style, and is sim- ilar in many respects to the house Boise banker C.W. Moore had built in 1879. (Moore's house was better known in later years as the DeLamar.) Its plan probably came from a pattern book; its decorative ele- ments definitely came from a cat- alog. Many of them are pictured in one in the collection of the Idaho Historical Society. (Arthur Hart is director of the Idaho Historical Society.) -/ pw's Design of Hormaechea cabin earned top award. McCall firm wins 2 design awards McCall Design and Planning has won two awards in the annual Honor Awards Program of the Idaho Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The McCall firm won two of the 11 awards given statewide by the AIA to encourage ex- cellence in architecture. One of the awards was given for the Hor- maechea cabin located along Payette Lake off Warren Wagon Road. Andrew Laidlaw of Mc- Call Design and Planning was the architect on the project. The second award was given to the McCall firm for River's Bend condominiums located along the North Fork of the Payette River on Mather Road. Laidlaw also was the architect on the project. Mark DeReus was project designer and Neal Russel Construction was the general contractor. Another McCall -area project that received an award in the competition was the High Llama Ranch, which was designed by Nat Adams and Associates of Boise. The design awards will be formally presented at a dinner in Boise on March 2. The AIA awards program is open to architec- tural projects of all classifications. Entries were judged not in competition with other entries, but on the basis of the architect's solution to the pro- blem and its worthiness for an award, according to the contest rules. The Idaho awards were judged by a panel of five California architects.