When Your House Might Be a Modernist Copycat

Mellanie Silva first fell in love with her midcentury-modern East Texas residence after coming across a listing for it on Facebook. Though the 1965 home, located in the small town of Colmesneil, was across the state from where she’d been living, she couldn’t resist its asymmetrical roofline and shag-carpeted conversation pit. To her, the house was more than worth making the three-hour drive to see in person. Though Silva hadn’t been seriously looking to buy, she decided to make an offer—and got it. Once the house was hers, she and her fiancé relocated to Colmesneil and started posting photos of the property under the name Big Pines MCM on social media.

A few months in, one of Big Pines MCM’s followers reached out to Silva and asked if she’d heard of the 20th-century Chicago architect Harry Weese. Turns out, Big Pines’s distinctive roofline—twin gables connected by a lower rooftop—and other details, like its two wings linked by a suspended walkway above a double-sided fireplace and conversation pit, took lines from the noted modernist’s own home in the Chicago suburb of Barrington.

Weese—who in the 1930s studied at MIT under Alvar Aalto alongside I. M. Pei and Eero Saarinen and was mentored by Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook, where he became close with Eero and Charles Eames—designed a series of houses in the area for his wife, interior designer Kitty Baldwin Weese, and their three daughters. But the Weese House and Studio is his most celebrated. The prolific modernist architect, who also specialized in historic preservation, built the home as a winter studio and summer getaway for his family in the late ’50s, shortly after his career took off. It received national exposure in an October 1958 issue of Life and was also featured in Architectural Record’s "Houses of 1960" study.

Intrigued, Silva reached out to the person who sold her the East Texas residence—the daughter of the original homeowner, Helen Robertson—to inquire about its pedigree. Robertson’s daughter told Silva that, according to the family’s story, her mother saw Weese’s house in the 1958 Life spread and decided to copy it, bringing the magazine to Port Arthur, Texas, firm Braun & Bernhardt to show the architects what she wanted. The specifics, though, are murky, as there’s no record of Robertson’s correspondence with the architects, and all of them have since passed away. Silva collected the original blueprints from Robertson’s family and tried to do an internet deep-dive on her home’s history, but she couldn’t track down any official documentation linking the Weese House and Studio to its East Texas lookalike. Still, the architect’s Barrington home "is the only example of our roofline that I’ve been able to find," Silva says. "Also, the interior floor plan is so similar."

Architecture historian and critic Robert Bruegmann thinks it’s possible that Silva’s house is a close copy of Weese’s home. "By the 1950s, Weese was appearing in national magazines—so it could have happened," says the University of Illinois at Chicago professor, who has studied Weese’s work for decades and authored the 2010 book The Architecture of Harry Weese. "Weese would design something, and his attitude was, Let’s build it and see if it stands," adds Bruegmann. "It was more of an experimental type of thing than a set of rules to follow."