Collins-Mitchem House. 6819 Berryhill Street. Circa 1925. Frame Vernacular. This house has a unique composition of style with an emphasis on Prairie elements that feature Craftsman columns that support a deep, wide one story porch. The wide eaves with exposed rafters, ribbon windows and port cochere emphasize the contemporary vision of Frank Loyd Wright, a popular architect at the time of the building's construction. The building has a porte-cochere,* exposed rafter ends and wood brackets that were typical of the 1920s bungalow houses.
* A porte-cochere is a covered entrance large enough for vehicles to pass through, typically opening into a courtyard. a porch where vehicles stop to discharge passengers.
In 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright founded his architectural practice in Oak Park, a quiet, semi-rural village on the Western edges of Chicago. It was at his Oak Park Studio during the first decade of the twentieth century that Wright pioneered a bold new approach to domestic architecture, the Prairie style. Inspired by the broad, flat landscape of America’s Midwest, the Prairie style was the first uniquely American architectural style of what has been called “the American Century.”
Wright’s prairie style focused specifically on midwestern regionalism, with its horizontal, open floor plans representing the expansive prairie region. Though avoiding historical stylistic trends of the competing revival styles, the prairie style made subtle use of Japanese architecture, specifically its use of horizontal space, flowing interior spaces; low-pitched, hipped roofs with broad eaves, and long bands of windows that apparently invoke the idea of Japanese screens (small, patterned pane glass). Though short-lived in the U.S., this is the first American style to be taken seriously in Europe (Source: McAlester & McAlester).
Credits and Sources:
https://flwright.org/researchexplore/prairiestyle
National Register of Historic Places: Milton, Florida. November 8, 1987. National Register Identification Number 87001944
Brian D. Rucker, “Blackwater and Yellow Pine: The Development of Santa Rosa County, 1821-1865. (Ph.D diss., Florida State University, 1990).
Virginia Savage McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2013).
Gerald Foster. American Houses. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2004).
Maurie Van Buren. House Styles at a Glance. (Marietta, Georgia: Longstreet Press. 1991).
