SUMMARY
The modern English Cottage located on SW Hawthorne Terrace in the Portland Heights neighborhood of southwest Portland, Oregon that was built for businessman Walter Zimmerman was designed by Wade Pipes and constructed in 1931. Wade Hampton Pipes is generally acknowledged to have been the state’s leading exponent of the English Arts and Crafts movement. What sets his work apart is its evolution to modern design without abandonment of traditional roots.
The Zimmerman House is a well-preserved and distinctive example of Pipes’s evolving work of the early 1930s. As such, it meets National Register Criterion C. It conveys well the Arts and Crafts tenets of relating building to site and emphasis on craftsmanship. At the same time, it shows the architect’s experimentation with curvilinear forms as a foil to the high angularity of gable peaks, jetties and perpendicular wings. The contrasting line is superbly realized in bowed window bays, in terrace pavements, in the cylindrical stair tower containing its geometric stair, and in the elegantly sinuous profile of the stair’s upper landing and iron hand-railing.
The two-story house is irregularly composed in both plan and volume, in the manner of its vernacular archetypes, giving the impression it has grown by addition over time. It is essentially an L-shaped scheme with its main volume facing north, presenting its major axis parallel to the streetfront. A long service wing extends at a right angle from the west end. A basement was excavated for a garage at the south end of the wing, which is bracketed by a long, steeply sloping roof. Exterior elevations are picturesque in their variation, combining handsome brick facing and wide weatherboards for much of the projecting upper story and all gable ends. Yet, the exterior shows equally the emphasis placed by the architect on simplified, abstract form, partly accomplished through close verges for gables and frameless multi-light window openings, all of which conveys a modern feeling. Everywhere to be seen is the finesse of detail that typifies the best of Pipes’s work—a gablet kitchen door hood, an apsidal breakfast nook bay, brick pilaster strips reaching into a gable front, subtly jettied gable ends, and bold chimney shafts split with grooves or embossed with hanging pilaster strips that make a truly modern interpretation of the clustered flue.
WALTER S. ZIMMERMAN
Walter S. Zimmerman was born in Baltimore in 1876. He came to Portland in 1904 and joined a logging and railway equipment firm. He later became president of the company which was known as The Zimmerman, Wells, Brown Company. In 1931 Zimmerman demolished a small residence at 580 Hawthorne in order to clear the site for his new residence. A mere three years after Zimmerman built the house he died.
Zimmerman was married at the time of his death to Sophie C. Zimmerman, a native Portlander. Sophie was born in 1876 and first married to Walter’s brother Frank.
Sophie, like Walter, lived in the house until her death in 1952. Sophie had a daughter, Helen, by her first marriage, who continued to live in the house until she died in 1972. Helen was born in 1897 in Portland and was a graduate of Columbia University. She taught school at Catlin Gable.
WADE HAMPTON PIPES / architect
Wade Hampton Pipes was a very talented Portland architect whose practice was confined to residential work. He practiced for 50 years, from 1911 to 1961, and created a Wade Pipes style which was often imitated by builders and other architects, but the imitations always fell short of the achievement of a Pipes house.
Pipes was born at Independence, Oregon on July 31, 1877, the son of Martin Luther and Mary Skipworth Pipes. They were married in Louisiana in 1874 and came to Independence, Oregon in 1875. Wade Pipes was the second of five Pipes children. In 1882 the Pipes family moved to Dallas, Oregon. Four years later, in 1886, Martin Pipes became the editor and owner of the Corvallis newspaper The Benton Leader, and the family moved to Corvallis.
Wade Pipes grew up in rural surroundings in small towns learning to love nature. Taught by his father he became a skilled woodworker. He loved camping, reading, and life with his family, and attended the public schools in Corvallis while they lived there.
About 1895 the Pipes family moved again, this time to Portland. There Wade worked as a clerk for two years, first for a farmers and mechanics store and then for the Great Eastern Shoe Co.
It is not known to what extent Pipes attended college, if at all, but about 1906 he went to England where he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and travelled around the countryside absorbing domestic English architecture, both old and new. He was strongly influenced by the work of such English house architects as Phillip Webb, W.R. Lethaby, Richard Normal Shaw, Charles F.A. Voysey and Sir Edwin Lutyens. Of these he was most influenced by the work of Voysey and Lutyens. He also studied and absorbed the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement and its founders, A.W. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris.
In 1911 at the age of 33, Wade Pipes returned to Portland and commenced the practice of architecture. His first house was for his brother John and his wife, located in Sellwood on the east bank of the Willamette River. In this house, completed in 1912, Pipe’s characteristic style was already well defined and his career firmly launched. Commission followed commission and he was never without projects, even in the great depression of the 1930s.
The birth of the Wade Pipes style with his first house does not mean that this style was without growth and development. He explored infinite variations in the application of his vocabulary of materials and details. He also employed a great variety of concepts, always adapting concept and development to the site. In the 1930s he explored designs using Georgian concepts and details, but these were apparently not much used on executed designs. In his later years some of his designs could be described as leaning toward the Northwest Style, and even a few which might be called “Modern,” but these retained a flavor which was especially his own.
Some of his commissions were for large country houses, others for small cottages; but the majority were for city houses of moderate to large size. All of them were livable and incorporated his great attention to detail and a style which seems to be timeless.
Wade Pipes died at Portland on July 1, 1961, a month before his 84th birthday. He was devoted to his profession but cared little for business. He never learned to drive a car and either took public transportation or walked to his projects.
During construction he spent much time on the job and developed many details on the spot, making sketches on a scrap of paper or a piece of lumber. He wore a hat with the brim turned up one side, a cape over his shoulders, and carried a cane which he used to measure with and to point out things on the job. It is said that he only opened mail when he thought there was a check inside; the rest he put aside or threw away. Pipes left a wealth of legend about his eccentricities and the way that he designed and supervised his projects. He also left to Portland a legacy of some 75 distinctive houses, most of which are still standing.
Each Wade Pipes house was a unique design in which he synthesized the comfort and beauty of the English country house with its site and his client’s needs into a house which was his own special creation.
* While Pipes is credited with the design of the Zimmerman Residence original plans for the building list Harold W. Doty name also.
HAROLD W. DOTY / architect
Harold W. Doty was a well known Portland architect of fine houses in the 1920s and 1930s.
Doty was born at Spokane, Washington, December 28, 1895 and was educated in Portland public schools. He worked for Whitehouse & Fouilhoux as a draftsman from 1914 to 1916, and then during World War I served overseas with the U.S. Army Engineers. In 1919 and 1920 he worked as a draftsman for Pierpont & Walter Davis in Los Angeles.
Returning to Portland in 1920, he was a draftsman with Lawrence & Holford in 1920 and 1921. From 1922 to 1926 he was an associate with Wade Pipes, a prominent designer of houses in the English style. In 1926 Doty established his own practice. In 1929 he again associated with Wade Pipes on a house for Walter S. Zimmerman. Doty designed a large number of fine houses in the next 15 years, some in Colonial styles but the majority with French and English flavor similar in style to the work of Wade Pipes.
Doty’s houses were featured in a 1933 issue of the national magazine, Architectural Record. He also wrote on architecture, being a contributing editor for Architect and Engineer magazine. Doty was active in the Oregon Chapter of the American Institute of
Architects, serving as vice president 1918-29; president 1931-32; and director 1933-35.
Source: National Register of Historic Places (NRIS) Reference Number: 91000141, Walter S. Zimmerman House, Portland, OR. Date listed: 2/28/1991
National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmarks Program Records: Oregon
