Harwood Taylor's Electri-Living house

[sevfiv]

Houston Mod has a page (here) with the delineation and information, but no current pictures.

Harwood Taylor built this house for himself in 1958 as part of a residential building program sponsored by Living For Young Homemakers Magazine together with local utility companies as part of the Electri-Living Program. Each of 12 houses was given a budget of $18,000 (exclusive of the property costs). The program had three guidelines: to satisfy the emotional and special needs of an average young couple with two to four children, to accommodate the full electrical load of household appliances now on the market with allowances for additional equipment in the future, and to be adaptable to the builder house market. It was was awarded first prize at the conclusion of the Electri-Living program.

The house was featured in a compilation of Architectural Record Magazine articles called The Second Treasury of Contemporary Homes, under the title “Economy in Courtyard House”. Every room in the house has a private courtyard, but interestingly there no backyard or sideyard views beyond the courtyards. Glass walls and doors give access to the courtyards. Fred Buxton was employed as the landscape architect and gave the courtyards easy to maintain gravel and concrete pavers. Horizontal lattice-work over the courtyards break the glare of the sun and skylights are employed in the kitchen and bathrooms to provide natural lighting inside the house.

9606 Meadowglen:

and in this aerial, you can see the lattice on the courtyards a little bit:

http://arch-ive.org/archive/electri-living/

[NenaE]

Surprising to me that a house in Tanglewilde would be in this condition...it needs some tlc. Nice design, what a history.

[Willowisp]

Thanks for the current picture. I'd been over there 4 or 5 times and could never get a shot worth putting on the website. Always 3 or 4 cars in the driveway, that lil tykes basketball hoop etc... When it came to making a decision for the website, we just decided to leave it alone and put the drawing up since the drawing was so nice.

By the way, when they (Cynthia Taylor, Ben Koush, Stephen Fox) did the discussion (when Ben Koush's book on Taylor was released) - that house was probably the most interesting part of the evening's talk. She talked about how it was way out in the middle of nowhere, and they were one of the first houses to be built out there.

Jason

[NenaE]

Surprising to me that a house in Tanglewilde would be in this condition...it needs some tlc. Nice design, what a history.

Oops, I was getting Tanglewilde & Tanglewood mixed up. There are many nice mods in Tanglewilde, unfortunately, many have deteriorated, as this one has. "In the middle of nowhere", reminds me of how they described the homes in Memorial Bend, far out Memorial, in the woods.