RICHARD GUY WILSON

The most popular architect among the American middle class after World War II employed three names —and it was not Frank Lloyd Wright but Royal Barry Wills. Life magazine in 1946 anointed Wills as creating "the kind of house most Americans want," because his books sold more than 520,000 copies, and he had designed some 1,100 houses. Earlier, in 1938, Wills had dueled with Wright in a Life magazine contest over houses for the middle class. Wright entered one of his Usonian designs and Wills showed a Cape Cod house. Although the family initially favored Wright, they selected Wills in the end and built his Cape Cod design.¹²

Houses designed or influenced by Royal Barry Wills were ubiquitous, as Americans devoured his books, discovered his designs in homemaker and housebuilding magazines and newspapers, and either bought his plans or contacted him for a custom design. By the time of his death, in 1962, Wills and his firm were responsible for more than 2,500 houses. Wills was so popular that a writer for the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 observed: "Many a would-be home owner, surveying the infinite variations of Mr. Wills's Cape Codders in plan books and magazines has concluded that he is the man who some­how invented the design."¹³

Wills was born in the Boston suburb of Melrose in 1895 and he died in Boston in 1962. He studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he gradu­ated in 1918, and worked as a design engineer for the Turner Construction Company while moonlighting as an architect. In 1925 Wills opened a Boston architectural office and designed in the various historical idioms. With the onset of the Great Depression, he increasingly turned his attention to small (1,000 square feet) houses and began publishing a vari­ety of colonial-derived designs with the Cape Cod idiom pre­dominating. The prominent modernist Hugh Stubbins worked for Wills from 1935 to 1937, producing some Interna­tional Style houses for the firm. However, Wills's reputation lay with the Colonial Revival house, and after World War II he was everywhere—constantly published, reviewed, and lauded, though always by the homemaker magazines, not the professional ones. Of course the modern architectural estab­lishment did not care for Wills, but he never suffered because of it, and he often poked fun at his detractors with cartoons. Wills's sense of humor led him to write an article entitled "Confessions of a Cape Codder"(1949), and the book Houses Have Funny Bones (1951). An astute businessman and an archi­tect who understood his clients, he recognized what many Americans desired in a house and provided solutions.¹⁴

The house for Rudolph J. Schaeffer at Mamaroneck, New York, built in 1956, exemplifies Wills's mature handling of the Cape Cod cottage. The low-rising clapboarded house spreads across the lot through a series of additive wings. Heavy stone chimneys anchor the house. Wills paid attention to landscap­ing, maintaining several large trees on the site; the clustering of low azaleas along the house's foundation reflects twenti­eth-century suburban design, not eighteenth-century A cob­blestone driveway added an air of age to the necessary garage, which was disguised as a carriage shed. The entrance porch was unorthodox in the sense that colonial Capes seldom had such a feature, but Wills enhanced it with massive timbers and braces (sometimes called gunstocks) that might have come from a barn or outbuilding. Window sashes with twelve-over-twelve lights were employed on the main block. The plan owes a debt to eighteenth-century New England houses, but Wills made it more spacious and reconfigured some of the rooms. A wing off the rear contains a study and a screened porch. The entry hall has the traditional staircase with turned balusters —situated to greet the visitor—along with exposed beams and old square bricks for the floor, which are large to make for easier communication with the other rooms. The major rooms received appropriate detailing such as old-board wainscoting, or the more sophisticated dadoes and pilasters as seen in the dining room. Furnishings throughout were either antique or reproductions, which Wills advised on if asked.

Wills and his firm designed many houses in other Colonial Revival idioms, an example of which is the Walter Barker House (ca. 1940) in Nashua, New Hampshire. Drawing from early New England two-story farmhouses with extensions that provided covered connections to the barn and stables, the form still had relevance for the harsh winters. Now the extensions became a kitchen, laundry room, and garage. At one end, the second story overhung the first floor, and large finials from the early house were attached to the corner boards, adding to the air of a house that had evolved. The massive chimney had raised pilasters, and the roof had the appropriate twelve-inch pitch of the period. As a concession to the problems of winter and snow buildup, the roof was extended on brackets and did not have gutters. Recalling the idea of a house that grew over time, the entrance of the main block was slightly off-center. The door surrounds, with pilasters and small lights over the door, borrowed from Fed­eral-era New Hampshire houses. The plan, while drawing from the past, was very contemporary with its large hall that ran the depth of the house, and bow windows that opened the large living room and dining room onto the rear garden. A book published by the Wills firm noted that bow windows "were not found in the early houses," but then explained: "However, had the inhabitants had our efficient heating systems, a bow window... would have been used."¹⁵ The large hall, with its wainscoting and wallpaper of early American scenes, was designed with the staircase tucked in the front corner, only the newel posts were turned and the balusters were appropriately simple, indicating that this was a farm house. As in other houses where Wills retained control of the design, proper reproduction hardware was employed and the dining room had a built-in corner cabinet.

Despite his large volume of work, Wills kept his firm small, usually employing only a few associates, such as Warren J. Rhoter and his son Richard Wills, who joined in 1952. In 1957, the com­pany became Royal Barry Wills Associates, and a third gener­ation, Jessica Barry Wills, came aboard in 1986. With offices in Boston and New Castle, Maine, the firm has major projects across the country, though houses continue to be its specialty.

The Herbert S. Pheeney House (1999) in Osterville on Cape Cod is clearly inspired by Federal-era houses of the Cape and Nantucket. Set back from the road with a four-hundred-foot drive, a grassy forecourt greets the visitor. The main block has a chimney on each end and a slightly off-center entrance with a fan light. Gray shingles, rather than clapboard, were employed on the exterior in keeping with local traditions. The wings contain various family rooms and the garage is treated as a stable. A formal garden with parterres is to the rear, as is a swimming pool. The designs of the octagonal gar­den and pool structures can be traced to Mount Vernon. The interior contains a mixture of features that are common to the twentieth century, including a media room, and there are large windows to the rear for light and for connections to the garden. Richard FitzGerald advised on the interior, resulting in a mixture of colonial- and Federal-era furnishings supple­mented with nineteenth-century American art. The hall con­tains a mural illustrating local Osterville history, painted by New York artist James Alan Smith. The floor has wide boards and hand-stenciled patterns derived, again, from the Federal period. Evoking the oriental connections of many Cape Cod ship captains of the Federal period, the dining room's walls are covered in a hand-painted Chinese-styled wallpaper. All of the house's front-facing windows have inte­rior shutters that fold back into recesses in the deep wall. The house is impressive but also reticent in the best Royal Barry Wills tradition.¹⁶

12. "Royal Barry Wills," Life 21, no. 9 (August 26,1946): 67-72 Eight Houses for Modern Living," Life 5, no. 13 (September 26, 1938): 44-67; and Architectural Forum 69, no. 5 (November 1938): 312-48. The books by Wills, all of which had multiple editions, are: Houses for Good Living (New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1940); Better Houses for Budgeters (New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1941); and Houses for Homemakers (New York: Watts, 1945).
13. Arnold Nicholson, "Big Man in Small Houses," Saturday Evening Post 230, no. 39 (March 29, 1958): 36.
14. Royal Barry Wills, "Confessions of a Cape Codder" Architectural Record 105, no. 4 (April 1949): 132-34. David Gebhard, "Royal Barry Wills," Winterthur Portfolio 27, no. I (Spring 1992): 45-74, is the best treatment of the Wills. See also "The New England Tradition and Royal Barry Wills," House and Home 17, no.2 (February 1960): 97-109.
15. Royal Barry Wills Associates, Houses for Good Living (New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1993), 74.
16. Information supplied by Richard Wills.