Sutor House foyer (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In the November issue of Dwell magazine, I had the opportunity to write about one of the great works of residential architecture in Portland: the Jennings Sutor House by Pietro Belluschi from 1938, which has undergone a renovation overseen and designed by the legendary architect's son, Anthony Belluschi. After summarizing the story in 500 brief words for the magazine, I can flesh it out a little more here.
Any house by Pietro Belluschi is of course significant, for he and John Yeon are, along with A.E. Doyle, Belluschi's former boss (because of Doyle's Wentz Cottage on the Oregon coast), the forefathers of the regional Northwest Modern house style that married International Style modernism with wood buildings featuring pitched roofs, large overhangs and a combination of local traditions (farmhouses, barns) and Japanese influences.
The Sutor is particularly special. It's not the absolute first Belluschi-designed house. That would be the Council Crest House, completed in 1937, which a few years ago was renovated by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture. It undeniably shows a recognizable Belluschi fingerprint, but with its brick facade and simple boxiness, it is arguably a reflection of Belluschi at the time working in architect Doyle's office. Belluschi biographer Meredith Clausen in her book Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect describes the Council Crest house as being identifiably Belluschi and Northwest yet retaining "lingering Georgian associations" from Doyle. There was also an existing farmhouse in Aloha that Belluschi renovated for his family.
Yet the Sutor, along with the John Yeon-designed Watzek House completed a year earlier, really came to establish the Northwest Modern regional style from the template of Doyle's Wentz Cottage. "It was a significant change in the sense of establishing that midcentury modern direction," explained Anthony Belluschi of the Sutor House in our interviews for the Dwell article.
Sutor House exterior (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)
Great as the Sutor House is, the story really starts with the hillside site. "He knew the hillside because he’d worked on the design for the Watzek," while in Doyle's office, Anthony added. (Yeon was not licensed as an architect so Doyle's office served as architect of record.) "He’d walked the site. And Jennings Sutor was wealthy enough he could afford a piece of property with that view, the original view, of Mt. Hood: he understood how important it was to get a view from every room. He did such a great job of siting the house. I think the Sutor is remarkable in the sense of the siting. It’s the best use of a great piece of property given the view corridor and the garden."
The Sutor was also about showcasing Belluschi's fascination with wood, Anthony Belluschi said of Pietro: "He came from Italy. They don’t have big forests at all. When he came to the Northwest, you’ll see the Portland Art Museum is brick and travertine, but his fascination with houses was he had access to these natural materials like the wood. He got into that. It was all new to him, whereas others took it for granted: the grains of the different woods. I think he really mastered that." At the same time, the Sutor House, like the Watzek, really shows the influence of Japanese architecture on Northwest Modernism. Looking at the house it's not hard to see its resemblance to a traditional pagoda.
In the Sutor's case case, the Japanese influence can be seen not just in the house itself but the garden. The Sutor occupies a four-acre site bordering a protected forested hillside. While designing the house, Belluschi befriended Jiro Harada, a professor at the Imperial Household Museum in Tokyo and author of numerous books on Japanese gardens and architecture who was in the Northwest as a visiting professor at the University of Oregon. Influenced by Harada, Belluschi and local landscape architect Florence Holmes Gerke created an elegant, Japanese-style strolling garden. A 1948 Sunset magazine article concentrated more on the house’s garden-like setting than on its architecture.
Owner Aric Wood pointing out portions of the uncovered garden (Brian Libby)
"When Hirada was lecturing at the Portland Art Museum he and Belluschi struck up a number of conversations that stimulated his ideas about Japanese art and architecture: the basket weave ceiling, the overhanging eaves," explained the Sutor's current owner, Aric Wood. But in subsequent decades, the garden, perhaps Hirada's biggest influence on Belluschi, was until recently, mostly buried.
With its large roof overhangs (a staple of Northwest Modern) and its covered backyard portico, the design is meant to foster indoor-outdoor living. "When you live here you recognize the house and the garden are inseparable," Wood added. "We kind of flow through the house with the seasons. Spring and summer, our living room is the portico. The dining room is the terrace. The winter we contract to the hearth."
Anthony Belluschi acted not only as the architect supervising the renovation, but also a kind of matchmaker between the Sutor's last owner, André Stevens and its new one, as he has done for other houses designed by his father.
"I knew André going back 25 years," he recalled. A few years ago she approached Anthony about becoming the owner himself. "I was a long way from having any idea of when I’d come back to Portland but knew I was destined. She said in her Swiss accent, 'I so want you to have this house.' I said, 'I really love it.' It’s a wonderful piece of property, and other than the house he designed for our family in 1937, it’s the first he did for a client in the style he wanted. I stayed in touch, and any time I came to Portland I’d go up to see the house and say hello."
But he wasn't quite ready to move here, and when he did, Belluschi had his eye on the house his parents had ultimately occupied, the Burkes house. "Of the 35 plus houses my father did, the Sutor house and this one [the Burkes] are the best in terms of siting, layout, materials," he told me. "Without exception, the cream of the crop was the houses he did from the late '30s, '40s and '50s."
Sutor House living room and extended entertaining space (Brian Flaherty for Dwell)
If Anthony Belluschi wasn't going to live in the Sutor, he decided to play matchmaker. First he took two well-known architects on tours of the Sutor house, each interested in purchasing. But one of them already owned a Pietro Belluschi house and decided to stay in it. The other intended to make some major alterations to the Sutor. "That was distressing to André," Marti Belluschi, Anthony's wife, told me. "She wanted a buyer who appreciated it as-is."
That's when Anthony approached Wood, a fellow member of the Pacific Northwest College of Art board of directors. "André took him on a tour and he just fell in love," Belluschi recalls. "We knew he'd be a perfect owner." There was even a moment when Wood, touring the house with Belluschi and Stevens, identified a location in a painting of the Alps near Stevens' original home in Switzerland. It helped seal the notion that he was the right person to whom Stevens could sell the house. And ironically, Wood's company, XPLANE, is based in the Pietro Belluschi-designed Equitable Building downtown, perhaps the most important building in the acclaimed architect's entire career. Anthony Belluschi says Wood may be the only person in the world who lives and works in two different Pietro buildings.
To buy the Sutor house, though, meant Wood would have to abandon his dream-house plans. "I had bought a piece of land on Skyline Boulevard. My dream was to build a home," he said. "I had the permits set and was ready to break ground." But ultimately Wood fell in love with the Sutor.
Unfortunately the house had been altered from Pietro Belluschi's original design, but not irreversibly so. One of the bedrooms near the entrance, originally the maid's quarters, had been turned into a breakfast nook and the kitchen altered. Despite the beauty of the design, it was only a two-bedroom house, meaning Wood's two children would have to share a bedroom. But Anthony Belluschi created a restorative plan that turned the breakfast nook back into a bedroom while also shrinking the size of a wet bar attached to the kitchen in order to expand the kitchen itself.
An original layout of the house (Aric Wood)
The renovation also restored the original configuration of the entry foyer and living room. It's somewhat of a strange layout, in that after passing the magnificent foyer, with its woven-wood ceiling and a curving grass paper-clad wall, one enters a kind of under-utilized space that can be considered part of an extended living room — ideal for entertaining during the days when Sutor, a well-connected bachelor, owned the house — but during Stevens' ownership had become a kind of second living room attached to the first. The Anthony Belluschi design removed the second living room and restored a series of built-in bookshelves that, along with a credenza, help give proper definition to each space.
As one enters the restored Sutor house, the pairing back of furniture and clutter in that double-sized living room allows one to really marvel at the gorgeous interiors and materials. Anthony Belluschi believes that curving wood wall at the foyer, for example, shows his father's Italian roots, as does the way the zebra wood-clad living room wall also curves at the corner of the space. "As Tony reminds me, this house was designed for entertaining," Wood said. "Sutor was a bachelor. For banquets or dances they needed that [extra] space off the living room. We didn’t get a feel for that initially because of how the prior owners had renovated that space. As soon as we restored it back to the original plan, you could feel it instantly."
What's also unmistakable about the house is the bounty of natural light. Not only is there floor-to-ceiling glass at the entrance and a long row of windows forming the living-room wall, but the relatively long, thin form of the house means there is always light coming in from at least two sides. Sitting in the living room, you get not only the light coming through its wall of windows but from the floor-to-ceiling glass at the patio just beyond the dining room table. The renovation also restored a wall of mirrors in the dining room perpendicular to the glass wall at the patio. So much natural light comes through the main living-dining space that the relatively dark zebra-wood walls and oak floor almost seem to glow.
Then there's the garden, which is not only huge given the four-acre property and the forested canyon it overlooks, but also the Japanese garden that Wood and his family have slowly uncovered. "We found so much buried. I never would have imagined that hillside was a strolling garden," Wood said. "It was so overgrown you couldn’t even find the rock wall. Then we followed the rock wall to find the stone steps. We dug out the stone steps to find the path. Last summer we discovered the pathways heading into the forest [the canyon sloping down from their property]. We found paths down to the creek and back up. It’s been kind of a continuous process of uncovering."
Looking at the Sutor House today, even in the context of there being many wonderful houses that Pietro Belluschi designed over some 50 years, I can't help but feel it ranks near the very top of the list if not the very top. Anthony Belluschi is understandably partial to the Burkes, which he and Marti live in. And indeed, it has panoramic views east of downtown Portland, Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens and more, not to mention a wonderfully intimate courtyard, with natural light permeating every inch of the interior. The Burkes may for that reason be the best Pietro Belluschi residential architectural experience.
Even so, at least for now I find myself even more drawn to the Sutor. The way the perches on that hillside, the garage it sits on acting partially as a plinth, makes the Sutor seem very grand, almost like a little Acropolis, despite its modest size. With its pitched roof and large overhangs, it shows the Japanese influence more than perhaps most Belluschi or Northwest Modern houses. And inside the materials are particularly memorable, particularly the aforementioned woven-wood ceiling, and the curving walls of exotic zebra wood and grass cloth. You feel all of Belluschi's influences in the house as well as, dare I say it, his competition with John Yeon after the bad blood that emerged from the Watzek (Doyle's office, which Belluschi was of course part of at the time, was in the past sometimes unfairly given credit for Yeon's design, which understandably embittered Yeon). Yet I have come to think of the Watzek and the Sutor as companion pieces. While the Sutor feels more classical, with its formal layout and its stately portico facing east, the Sutor is more Japanese, and yet they resemble each other perhaps more than they resemble their influences.
Talking with Anthony Belluschi, I also have a renewed sense of the late 1930s and 1940s as a particularly golden time for the architect. "He did St. Thomas Moore the same time as the Sutor House," he told me, referring to the great early Catholic church completed in 1940. "Those were all the best projects, from the '30s and '40s. Then he was less knee-deep in alligators on each project." In that way, Belluschi's very success and ambitions became for him a challenge, a juggling act, that ultimately led to his leaving Portland for some 20 years to be the dean of MIT's architecture school. During and after that time, Belluschi would produce some of his most famous designs, such as the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco and the Julliard School at Lincoln Center in New York, as well as a co-design of the Pan Am building there. Yet that pre-MIT period may still be the time of his simplest, finest architecture.
"Having the office here, the churches and houses were actually his favorite thing to do," Anthony Belluschi says of his father. "I think he put so much time and energy into the Equitable, and I think that was the crowning achievement in the first half of his career. The second part going to MIT, I think that’s a whole different scenario. The consulting role in that period was how he got involved with so many projects. I clearly think that the houses starting with the Sutor and up through this house [the Burkes], and the churches, are all gems. There aren’t many exceptions."
Advertisements
Comments