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Royal Barry’s Wills home, 1920, Melrose, Mass.

Posted by: • July 8, 2010

Oh my goodness, I’m having palpitations, this is the sweetheart Cape Cod home that architect Royal Barry Wills built for himself and his family in 1920 in Melrose, Mass. Before he went and got all famous and became the #1 influence (in my view) on mid-century homes all across America. This house should go into historic preservation. And – they should restore it inside and out to look just like it did on the magazine cover shown in the listing information — I assume it’s the same house. For sale as of July 2010.

Mid-century “Early American” street sign

Posted by: • January 7, 2010

You know I do love my Royal Barry Wills’ houses. This one has a wishing well, a cupola with a cricket, a knotty pine den and Early American kitchen wallpaper. But best of all: the sweetest ever vintage street sign. Will the list of things I find to covet never ever end? Good job on the real estate agent who included this photo in the listing.

The Royal Barry Wills Cape Home

Posted by: • November 2, 2009

royal-barry-wills-good-design-copyrighted-image

Guest post today from Dave Stuhlsatz, architect with Royal Barry Wills Associates, and my main contact there for all things RBW. I am very pleased that Dave will contribute an occasional article on mid-century architecture, design and related issues. – Pam

The Royal Barry Wills Cape Home
By Dave Stuhlsatz, Royal Barry Wills Associates

The time seems appropriate to revisit Cape Cod House design as it was promoted by a pioneer of their twentieth century revival, Boston architect Royal Barry Wills. When Wills started out in his architecture career he established himself designing English Tudor inspired homes in suburban towns around Boston like Newton and Brookline. But, it was his rigorous examination and subsequent success with the Cape and Colonial Revival homes that cemented his reputation as one of the most influential residential architects in America. Heck yeah there is more →

In praise of Royal Barry Wills and his important role in popularizing and proliferating Cape Cod and colonial homes in the postwar era

Posted by: • July 6, 2008

A new reader – another Pam – wrote recently to tell me about her Royal Barry Wills home north of Boston and to ask me some kitchen questions. Meanwhile, she has turned me on to this amazing designer – whose Cape Cods and colonials were just as important and influential in postwar design history as any modernists. For today’s Sunday reading, here’s a essay by Richard Guy Wilson, which I’ve continued via a link to the Royal Barry Wills design firm, which still operates today:

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.

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