Keeping up with Jones in Vallejo
Dave Weinstein, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, November 6, 2004
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In Vallejo, a town that cherishes its historic buildings, no architect is regarded with more affection than William A. Jones, who designed many of the town's signature brown-shingle homes and the landmark Empress Theatre. But it isn't every day that a newcomer falls in love with him.
Pearl Tranter saw it happen when architect Judy Irvin rang her front doorbell. Tranter, Jones' granddaughter, lives in the Jones House, the family home designed by Jones in 1912, an L-shaped, two-story brown shingle with a courtyard and a broad porch held up by four squat and surprisingly featureless columns.
"Judy came over," Tranter remembers. "I went to the door -- and she was hugging the columns." Tranter adds: "These columns are huge, huge, huge."
The oversize columns mean a lot to Irvin, whose career has focused on historic restoration. "You look at them," she says, "and you think, 'That's not right.' Yet it works so well."
Irvin discovered Jones after moving to Vallejo in 1998 and working on the successful effort to turn St. Vincent's Hill into a National Register Historic District. It is one of three national historic districts in town, with more than 1,000 historic buildings.
While surveying the neighborhood, she came across one Jones house, then another. "I kept looking and thought, 'How do you classify that?' " she says of a house on Florida Street. "It could be Colonial Revival, it could be Exotic Revival. But it was really well done. It piqued my fancy."
She soon decided Jones was Vallejo's best architect, more than just another small-town architect whose work reflects -- or distorts -- more sophisticated designs from the big city.
She compares his work in its sophistication and playfulness to that of San Francisco architects Ernest Coxhead and Willis Polk, two of the creators of the Bay Tradition, who in the late 19th century created a quasi-modern style by blending and twisting historical elements in a manner both quirky and knowing.
"I think he's a great architect," Irvin says. "I don't think he's been understood at all."
"His work is very good, in a very pure Shingle Style," she says, "but with an overlay, an idiosyncratic tendency that is really playful. Usually when you combine multiple elements in a design, it looks like a mishmash. He does it in an incredibly successful way."
Irvin was far from the first to recognize Jones' contribution to the town. "No little of the credit for the high standing of Vallejo architecturally is due to his genius and ability," the editors of "History of Solano and Napa Counties" wrote in the 1920s.
But some of Jones' fans today have only an indistinct appreciation of his work. Many focus on the brown-shingle homes he built throughout his career, especially a group along Georgia Street near the entrance to downtown, and the Jones house itself, but ignore homes in other styles.
"That's the most Jonesy Jones house," Irvin says, because of its shingles, informal plan, rustic ambience with a touch of formality, and idiosyncratic elements. But she also loves it for the sheer sensuality of its material, natural redwood inside and out, redwood boards filling the walls from floor to beamed redwood ceiling.
The downstairs plan is open, with an immense living room and large entryway. Glass-fronted Craftsman-style cabinetry is everywhere. The living room is dominated by a fireplace and an immense window seat looking toward Mare Island Strait. "It's not designed for one person to sit there and look out the window," Irvin says, "but a whole pack of people."
Another "Jonesy" Jones house was built around 1907 for a Mr. Halliday, prominent resident and onetime county clerk. It's got the same plan as the Jones house and the same squat columns, but more lathe-and-plaster inside and less redwood. Arched windows provide an unusual touch.
The house on Florida, originally a two-family home for workers at nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard, is yellow clapboard, not brown shingle, but it has Jones' eclectic touches, including classical detailing mixed with a Moorish arch. "I thought it was subtly Egyptian looking," says Deanna Forbes, who bought the home a few years ago and turned the upstairs flat into her painting studio.
Another startling Jones home, on Sutter Street, is Colonial in style, with classical pilasters that rise two stories at opposite ends of the house. But the facade's formality is waylaid by the oddly asymmetrical placement of an oval window. And, as the book "Vallejo's Architectural Heritage" says, the pilasters appear to be "floating on air." "A deliberate warping of Classical ideas," the book concludes.
Not every Jones home is playful or idiosyncratic. "You gave the client what they wanted," Tranter notes, and many clients wanted standard neoclassical homes or bungalows. One of Jones' largest homes is a wonderful neoclassic mansion on Marin Street with a steep gable and a wraparound porch.
Among Jones' larger projects are the exuberantly Beaux Arts-style Empress Theatre (1912), the classical Solano County Courthouse in Fairfield (in association with a Sacramento architect) and "many of the finest and most costly structures in the city," according to "The History of Napa and Solano Counties," including the Gothic-style First Baptist Church (1922).
Some of his larger buildings were torn down for redevelopment in the 1960s and '70s.
Jones got into building both from hands-on work with his father and from association with some of the Bay Area's leading architects.
Jones moved from Vermont to Vallejo as a boy in 1872. His father became foreman in the molding shop at Mare Island. Will enjoyed sculling on the strait with his brothers (in 1886, he designed and built a beautiful single scull, which remains on display at the Vallejo Yacht Club), and studied carriage making. Soon he was working on Mare Island.
But architecture appealed to him, and he took classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art on Nob Hill from 1894 to 1898. Bernard Maybeck ran the architecture program and cast a spell.
Jones was soon working for two of the city's leading architects, H.P. Merritt and then Clinton Day, who designed the original City of Paris department store in 1896. (Its stained-glass dome, from 1909, can still be seen in Neiman Marcus on Union Square.)
By 1898, Jones was back in Vallejo, working as chief architectural draftsman on Mare Island. Jones began designing homes on his own while working at Mare Island, including homes for family members in Santa Clara, San Francisco (an odd stucco Victorian that combines a classical porch with a medieval gable) and Vallejo.
In 1905, Jones left Mare Island to work in Reno. During this time he designed a home near Truckee.
By 1908, he was back in town and working on his own. His clients included many of the town's leading merchants. He joined the Masons and other community groups, and entered politics. Elected to the town's board of freeholders, Jones advocated the commission form of government, a Progressive stance at the time.
Besides designing buildings on his own, Jones served as an associate architect with out-of-town designers who needed somebody on site in Vallejo. He worked with Julia Morgan when she designed one of Vallejo's grandest homes.
A charter member of the Sierra Club, Jones was a small, strong, wiry man who loved fishing and hiking (a photo shows him atop a peak in bowler hat). He climbed Mount Whitney in 1906. An accomplished photographer, he explored Yosemite with a camera.
In 1907, while working on the Truckee house, he wrote -- in verse -- to his wife, Grace, about fly-fishing for trout in the Sierras and about an excursion they'd take to Green Valley once he returned home:
"We'd wander through the fields of hay, or up the creek we'd spend the day; we'd visit all the shady nooks where wildflowers grow by bubbling brooks; we'd tempt the trout with bogus flies, and if perchance we'd get a rise, our hopes would bound up to the skies ..."
Will and Grace had one son together. She was a widow who came with two daughters. The Joneses were teetotalers but knew how to enjoy life, Tranter says. Their home was filled with amateur theatricals, musicales and poetry recitals. Jones' watercolors of landscapes still decorate the home. Tranter, an artist, often works on Jones' drafting table, which she keeps in the living room.
Jones died in his upstairs bedroom of cancer at age 80.
"In the grand scheme of things, no, he wasn't a Maybeck," Tranter says. "No, he wasn't a Greene and Greene. But he did nice stuff."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jones landmarks
The Jones Home can be seen at 403 Alameda St. 1 in Vallejo, alongside a brown-shingle Dutch Colonial that Jones may also have designed in the late 1890s. Across the street, at 901 York 2, is the Jones Cottage, designed for his son William A. Jones III in 1930.
On Georgia Street approaching downtown Vallejo are several Jones brown- shingled homes, including a dual-gabled masterpiece at 720 Georgia, with a tall, arched window inside each gable, 3 and a two-story bungalow (obscured by trees) at 721 Georgia 4. 711 Georgia 5 is an attractive steep-gabled Colonial. Notice how the gable ends of this house and those of 720 swoop upward in Asian style.
One of Jones' most unusual facades can be found a few blocks away at 810 Sutter St. 6 It parodies symmetry because its symmetrical porch is not symmetrically placed and the oval window, instead of being centered on second floor, is placed playfully at one end, playful. The giant pilasters appear to be floating in air.
Moorish touches can be spotted at a home designed as two apartments at 301 Florida. 7
The Beaux Arts-style Empress Theatre from 1912, which will be restored as a performing arts center, is at 338 Virginia St. 8 downtown.
-- Dave Weinstein
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William A. Jones (1859-1939)
Style: Jones' best-known houses can be called First Bay Tradition for the way they idiosyncratically play with historic styles.
Active: Jones designed homes, offices, churches and other buildings in Vallejo and nearby areas from the late 1890s to the early 1930s.
Known for: Brown-shingle homes with squat columns; homes that successfully combine disparate elements.
Other practitioners: Better-known creators in the First Bay Tradition include Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Julia Morgan and Ernest Coxhead.
--
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Dave Weinstein, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, November 6, 2004
More...
a.. Printable Version
b.. Email This Article
More H&G Articles
The Latest Green Gardener
In Vallejo, a town that cherishes its historic buildings, no architect is regarded with more affection than William A. Jones, who designed many of the town's signature brown-shingle homes and the landmark Empress Theatre. But it isn't every day that a newcomer falls in love with him.
Pearl Tranter saw it happen when architect Judy Irvin rang her front doorbell. Tranter, Jones' granddaughter, lives in the Jones House, the family home designed by Jones in 1912, an L-shaped, two-story brown shingle with a courtyard and a broad porch held up by four squat and surprisingly featureless columns.
"Judy came over," Tranter remembers. "I went to the door -- and she was hugging the columns." Tranter adds: "These columns are huge, huge, huge."
The oversize columns mean a lot to Irvin, whose career has focused on historic restoration. "You look at them," she says, "and you think, 'That's not right.' Yet it works so well."
Irvin discovered Jones after moving to Vallejo in 1998 and working on the successful effort to turn St. Vincent's Hill into a National Register Historic District. It is one of three national historic districts in town, with more than 1,000 historic buildings.
While surveying the neighborhood, she came across one Jones house, then another. "I kept looking and thought, 'How do you classify that?' " she says of a house on Florida Street. "It could be Colonial Revival, it could be Exotic Revival. But it was really well done. It piqued my fancy."
She soon decided Jones was Vallejo's best architect, more than just another small-town architect whose work reflects -- or distorts -- more sophisticated designs from the big city.
She compares his work in its sophistication and playfulness to that of San Francisco architects Ernest Coxhead and Willis Polk, two of the creators of the Bay Tradition, who in the late 19th century created a quasi-modern style by blending and twisting historical elements in a manner both quirky and knowing.
"I think he's a great architect," Irvin says. "I don't think he's been understood at all."
"His work is very good, in a very pure Shingle Style," she says, "but with an overlay, an idiosyncratic tendency that is really playful. Usually when you combine multiple elements in a design, it looks like a mishmash. He does it in an incredibly successful way."
Irvin was far from the first to recognize Jones' contribution to the town. "No little of the credit for the high standing of Vallejo architecturally is due to his genius and ability," the editors of "History of Solano and Napa Counties" wrote in the 1920s.
But some of Jones' fans today have only an indistinct appreciation of his work. Many focus on the brown-shingle homes he built throughout his career, especially a group along Georgia Street near the entrance to downtown, and the Jones house itself, but ignore homes in other styles.
"That's the most Jonesy Jones house," Irvin says, because of its shingles, informal plan, rustic ambience with a touch of formality, and idiosyncratic elements. But she also loves it for the sheer sensuality of its material, natural redwood inside and out, redwood boards filling the walls from floor to beamed redwood ceiling.
The downstairs plan is open, with an immense living room and large entryway. Glass-fronted Craftsman-style cabinetry is everywhere. The living room is dominated by a fireplace and an immense window seat looking toward Mare Island Strait. "It's not designed for one person to sit there and look out the window," Irvin says, "but a whole pack of people."
Another "Jonesy" Jones house was built around 1907 for a Mr. Halliday, prominent resident and onetime county clerk. It's got the same plan as the Jones house and the same squat columns, but more lathe-and-plaster inside and less redwood. Arched windows provide an unusual touch.
The house on Florida, originally a two-family home for workers at nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard, is yellow clapboard, not brown shingle, but it has Jones' eclectic touches, including classical detailing mixed with a Moorish arch. "I thought it was subtly Egyptian looking," says Deanna Forbes, who bought the home a few years ago and turned the upstairs flat into her painting studio.
Another startling Jones home, on Sutter Street, is Colonial in style, with classical pilasters that rise two stories at opposite ends of the house. But the facade's formality is waylaid by the oddly asymmetrical placement of an oval window. And, as the book "Vallejo's Architectural Heritage" says, the pilasters appear to be "floating on air." "A deliberate warping of Classical ideas," the book concludes.
Not every Jones home is playful or idiosyncratic. "You gave the client what they wanted," Tranter notes, and many clients wanted standard neoclassical homes or bungalows. One of Jones' largest homes is a wonderful neoclassic mansion on Marin Street with a steep gable and a wraparound porch.
Among Jones' larger projects are the exuberantly Beaux Arts-style Empress Theatre (1912), the classical Solano County Courthouse in Fairfield (in association with a Sacramento architect) and "many of the finest and most costly structures in the city," according to "The History of Napa and Solano Counties," including the Gothic-style First Baptist Church (1922).
Some of his larger buildings were torn down for redevelopment in the 1960s and '70s.
Jones got into building both from hands-on work with his father and from association with some of the Bay Area's leading architects.
Jones moved from Vermont to Vallejo as a boy in 1872. His father became foreman in the molding shop at Mare Island. Will enjoyed sculling on the strait with his brothers (in 1886, he designed and built a beautiful single scull, which remains on display at the Vallejo Yacht Club), and studied carriage making. Soon he was working on Mare Island.
But architecture appealed to him, and he took classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art on Nob Hill from 1894 to 1898. Bernard Maybeck ran the architecture program and cast a spell.
Jones was soon working for two of the city's leading architects, H.P. Merritt and then Clinton Day, who designed the original City of Paris department store in 1896. (Its stained-glass dome, from 1909, can still be seen in Neiman Marcus on Union Square.)
By 1898, Jones was back in Vallejo, working as chief architectural draftsman on Mare Island. Jones began designing homes on his own while working at Mare Island, including homes for family members in Santa Clara, San Francisco (an odd stucco Victorian that combines a classical porch with a medieval gable) and Vallejo.
In 1905, Jones left Mare Island to work in Reno. During this time he designed a home near Truckee.
By 1908, he was back in town and working on his own. His clients included many of the town's leading merchants. He joined the Masons and other community groups, and entered politics. Elected to the town's board of freeholders, Jones advocated the commission form of government, a Progressive stance at the time.
Besides designing buildings on his own, Jones served as an associate architect with out-of-town designers who needed somebody on site in Vallejo. He worked with Julia Morgan when she designed one of Vallejo's grandest homes.
A charter member of the Sierra Club, Jones was a small, strong, wiry man who loved fishing and hiking (a photo shows him atop a peak in bowler hat). He climbed Mount Whitney in 1906. An accomplished photographer, he explored Yosemite with a camera.
In 1907, while working on the Truckee house, he wrote -- in verse -- to his wife, Grace, about fly-fishing for trout in the Sierras and about an excursion they'd take to Green Valley once he returned home:
"We'd wander through the fields of hay, or up the creek we'd spend the day; we'd visit all the shady nooks where wildflowers grow by bubbling brooks; we'd tempt the trout with bogus flies, and if perchance we'd get a rise, our hopes would bound up to the skies ..."
Will and Grace had one son together. She was a widow who came with two daughters. The Joneses were teetotalers but knew how to enjoy life, Tranter says. Their home was filled with amateur theatricals, musicales and poetry recitals. Jones' watercolors of landscapes still decorate the home. Tranter, an artist, often works on Jones' drafting table, which she keeps in the living room.
Jones died in his upstairs bedroom of cancer at age 80.
"In the grand scheme of things, no, he wasn't a Maybeck," Tranter says. "No, he wasn't a Greene and Greene. But he did nice stuff."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jones landmarks
The Jones Home can be seen at 403 Alameda St. 1 in Vallejo, alongside a brown-shingle Dutch Colonial that Jones may also have designed in the late 1890s. Across the street, at 901 York 2, is the Jones Cottage, designed for his son William A. Jones III in 1930.
On Georgia Street approaching downtown Vallejo are several Jones brown- shingled homes, including a dual-gabled masterpiece at 720 Georgia, with a tall, arched window inside each gable, 3 and a two-story bungalow (obscured by trees) at 721 Georgia 4. 711 Georgia 5 is an attractive steep-gabled Colonial. Notice how the gable ends of this house and those of 720 swoop upward in Asian style.
One of Jones' most unusual facades can be found a few blocks away at 810 Sutter St. 6 It parodies symmetry because its symmetrical porch is not symmetrically placed and the oval window, instead of being centered on second floor, is placed playfully at one end, playful. The giant pilasters appear to be floating in air.
Moorish touches can be spotted at a home designed as two apartments at 301 Florida. 7
The Beaux Arts-style Empress Theatre from 1912, which will be restored as a performing arts center, is at 338 Virginia St. 8 downtown.
-- Dave Weinstein
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William A. Jones (1859-1939)
Style: Jones' best-known houses can be called First Bay Tradition for the way they idiosyncratically play with historic styles.
Active: Jones designed homes, offices, churches and other buildings in Vallejo and nearby areas from the late 1890s to the early 1930s.
Known for: Brown-shingle homes with squat columns; homes that successfully combine disparate elements.
Other practitioners: Better-known creators in the First Bay Tradition include Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Julia Morgan and Ernest Coxhead.
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html
