Longtime owner Bob Garvin has often welcomed
architectural tour groups into his home, the noted Hiss Studio on Lido
Key. Now comes the time to sell.
After a 43-year career with General Electric in engineering and marketing, much of it spent traveling the world selling aircraft engines, Bob Garvin knows how to present a concept to strangers.
That is how he became one of the best-known people in the Sarasota architecture community.
A natural public speaker, he doesn’t have formal architectural training. But during his career he saw a lot of buildings across the world, he knows what he likes and he bought and has lived in an architecturally significant home on Lido Key for years.
“I always loved contemporary architecture,” Garvin said. He understands it, too — an understanding he has shared in dozens of tours of his iconic home.
It doesn’t hurt that Garvin is, by his own admission, a “ham at heart.” His rich baritone voice sounds as if it is right off the Shakespearean stage. In fact, he was born in Austria and was sent to England by his parents at the age of 10 to escape Hitler. So he has a slight, if noble-sounding, British accent. He has the patrician bearing to match.
 |
| Hiss Studio Photo © Liam Ball |
“I loved showing off the house of which I was so proud,” says Garvin of the 1953 “Hiss Studio,” at 1310 Westway Drive in Lido Shores, which he bought in 1996. “I knew that if I had built a house, this was the kind of house I would have built.”
During these tours, he showed off the house’s impressive library, walls of glass, cork floors and spare, modernist geometry.
Designed by a 25-year-old Tim Seibert for Lido Shores developer Phil Hiss, the house, which has been home to Garvin and Julie Magenheim for 17 years, is notable not only for its International School architecture but for several other reasons. It is either the first house in Sarasota or among the first to:
• Have cork-tile floors.
• Be air-conditioned.
• Have walls of fixed glass panels.
• Use exterior metal louvers (removed in the 1990s) to control sunlight.
• Be expanded (among the midcentury “Sarasota School” houses) with an addition.
• Host a midcentury-modern architecture tour and “Dinner With an Architect,” during the 2001 American Legacy Tour presented by the Fine Arts Society of Sarasota. From that event, organizer Martie Lieberman co-founded the Sarasota Architectural Foundation, a group for which Garvin would later serve as a board member.
“Many times, people would be standing outside, gazing at the house, awestruck. ‘May I photograph the house?’ they would ask. I’d say, ‘Would you like to see it?’ If they looked respectable, we would invite them in.”
Garvin is speaking in the past tense deliberately. Time passes, lives change and Garvin and Magenheim feel the moment has arrived to sell the house. It is listed at $1.95 million through Klaus Lang of Michael Saunders & Co.
“We tell people it is not a museum,” Garvin said.
“Upstairs, we have had sit-down lunches for 45 and parties for 100 people,” said Magenheim, referring to the original, elevated section of the house, which has a large room that Hiss used for his library and which Garvin uses the same way.
“For a new owner, it could be used for presentations and parties, but also is good for living. We use it all the time.”
Lang noted that the renewed awareness of modernism in Sarasota, fostered by people like Garvin, has changed the trend in new-home construction near the bay and Gulf away from the Mediterranean Revival craze of 20 years ago.
“From traditional, it really has changed to contemporary whenever you have new homes,” Lang said. “And Bob is part of it by hosting all these tours.”
Garvin feels he is “unworthy” of such credit. “I am not an architect or an artist,” he said. “I am an engineer and a traveling salesman. I feel embarrassed because I never felt I was especially qualified.”
The Seibert icon
Siebert designed the original, iconic house from a concept by Hiss, who lived across the street but needed a studio for his library and office. At the time, Lido Shores was a man-made spit of sand created by dredging a shipping channel through New Pass to the old Payne Terminal in the 1920s. It was devoid of shade, not the lush enclave it is today.
“The house was Phil’s creation, but he needed someone to draw it up,” said Seibert, who will be 90 years old in November when he will be the featured architect of the fourth annual SarasotaMOD Weekend presented by the Sarasota Architectural Foundation. “Actually, I did just about all of it. Phil was busy as hell with other things. That was the chance of a lifetime.
“Phil was very good to me, a real gentleman,” said Seibert, who had been working for Hiss as a draftsman — they were introduced at a cocktail party in 1950 — when he got the Hiss Studio job.
Much beefier in appearance than its contemporary neighbor, the Umbrella House, the Hiss Studio is elevated on 14 steel columns that appear too skinny for the job but that work together to provide strength. The grade-level entry foyer is boxed in with unfinished concrete block.
As for the potential for storm surge, Seibert added, “I don’t think we talked about that much in those days. There was no county building department. We were just a bunch of young guys making buildings we liked.”
Fixed plate-glass windows and air-conditioning were another innovation Hiss wanted and could afford.
“It certainly was not common,” Seibert said. “That was 1953.” Downtown drug stores used to tempt pedestrians with signs that read, “Come in. It’s cool inside.”
“People driving around in gull-wing Mercedes didn’t worry about money,” Seibert said, stressing that air-conditioning made sense for the climate. “If you don’t have air conditioning, you pay a lot to have your draperies replaced, and your books go damp and soggy. So maybe it was time we designed buildings for air-conditioning.
“It was an experiment in how to air-condition a building in Florida.”
Architecturally, the Hiss Studio underscores the Sarasota School mantra of “clarity of concept,” Seibert said. “That is what I was learning to do at the time. Paul used to give me little lectures on how forms related to each other. ‘Never do this, and always do that.’”
In 1962, Hiss hired architect Bert Brosmith to design an addition to the studio. Almost completely hidden from the street, it is built on grade and brings the climate-conditioned area to 5,250 square feet with four bedrooms, a kitchen and four baths. The original studio consisted of the large library with a small apartment on the same upper level that included an office/bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.
“He did an excellent job,” Seibert said. He added that subsequent owners, the Sarna family, told him it was a “very livable place.”
Its architectural expression is almost entirely on the interior, which is connected to the Seibert-designed studio by a narrow concrete-block corridor illuminated by neon tubes between several of the blocks.
One of longtime Sarasota architect Carl Abbott’s first paychecks came from Brosmith for work on the addition — notably the floor-to-ceiling, solid-maple doors he designed. “He is very proud of the doors, and he has a right to be,” Garvin said. “Those doors have not moved an eighth of an inch. They go right to the ceiling. There is no play.”
Another outstanding feature is a small, atrium-like garden in the middle of the addition that is trimmed in copper.
The find
Four years before that, Heather and Lou Salvatori had learned about the house from Realtor Kim Ogilvie when it came on the market in 1992.
Now Heather Chapell, she had just finished restoring a Spanish-style house in Sarasota’s West of the Trail neighborhood and was ready for a break. But she followed Ogilvie’s advice and drove to Lido Shores to see the home.
“I went out and saw it, and called my mother, begging her for a loan, and put a down payment on it,” she recalled. “It was such an incredible house — different from anything I had ever seen.” The purchase price was $280,000. “Those (Abbott) doors were one of the things over which I was
salivating when I walked in,” Chapell said.
 |
| SAF Leads Midcentury Modern Architecture Tours on Lido Shores |
The Brosmith addition was 30 years old by that point, and the structures were “totally original,” Chapell said. “The work I did was restoration, other than I put a new kitchen in. The old one was tired. I restored the cork floors.”
“We did so much work in that house,” Chapell said. “It had the little atrium inside. We rescreened and redid the copper. The house had the most beautiful copper trim everywhere. And the green slate floors; we kept those. We restored the bathrooms and redid the courtyard with outdoor kitchen, barbecue and sink.”
What the Garvins — Rita Garvin died in 1999 but her tasteful eye for art is still evident within the house — could not see was the restoration work beneath the slab of the addition, including new plumbing.
“We burrowed under the house,” Chapell recalled. “I worked way too hard on it. I think I shoveled 20 tons of shell myself in that yard.”
The missing louvers
The biggest change Chapell made was to the exterior of the Seibert original. Although Seibert said the studio was not built with them, at some point metal louvers, which opened and closed like jalousie windows, were installed over the large window panels to control sunlight and help keep the interior cool.
“They looked like air-conditioning coils, and that drove me crazy, so I removed them,” Chapell said. But a year later, she realized the louvers’ value.
“I came upstairs one day and the heat had cracked one of the big windows,” she said. “We had to put film on the glass. And we added drapes. That seemed to do the trick.”
It was likely the same for Hiss. One day in the mid-1990s, Chapell recalled, Hiss’ daughter, Muffi, dropped by to share some stories of living there.
“Kids were not allowed in the studio,” Chapell said. “It was off-limits. The upstairs was a full apartment. I got the feeling from her that Phil basically lived up there most of the time.”
Hiss Studio was Tim Seibert's 'graduate school'
 |
| Architect Tim Seibert, FAIA |
While working on the design of the Hiss Studio 65 years ago, young
architect Tim Seibert enjoyed a bonus: Paul Rudolph, a budding star on
the national and world architecture scenes, was working next door on
Phil Hiss' model home for the Lido Shores development, the Umbrella
House. After work, Rudolph would walk next door and leave notes on
Seibert's blueprints.
"Paul gave me a brutal critique, I might add," Seibert said. "Paul was the bastard who was always right."
An example, painfully recalled by Seibert: "Your expression of structure," wrote Rudolph, "is as if a man's muscles were tattooed to his skin."
"Paul did wonderful critiques; I guess in a way he taught me how to be an architect," the long-retired Seibert said in a telephone interview from his home in Boca Grande.
"That was a wonderful education. My graduate school was with Paul and Phil. "That was a good way to learn to be an architect, and I am very grateful to both of them," said Seibert, who attended Stanford before studying architecture at the University of Florida.
Seibert, 89, will be the featured architect at the Sarasota Architectural Foundation's fourth annual SarasotaMOD Weekend in November 10, 11 and 12, 2017.
"I hope to give them their money's worth," he said. "I could tell them stories about architecture all night long. There are endless tales about Sarasota in the old days. I might mention the disaster of the bayfront drive, which really destroyed Sarasota. That was a bad idea." — Harold Bubil
"Paul gave me a brutal critique, I might add," Seibert said. "Paul was the bastard who was always right."
An example, painfully recalled by Seibert: "Your expression of structure," wrote Rudolph, "is as if a man's muscles were tattooed to his skin."
"Paul did wonderful critiques; I guess in a way he taught me how to be an architect," the long-retired Seibert said in a telephone interview from his home in Boca Grande.
"That was a wonderful education. My graduate school was with Paul and Phil. "That was a good way to learn to be an architect, and I am very grateful to both of them," said Seibert, who attended Stanford before studying architecture at the University of Florida.
Seibert, 89, will be the featured architect at the Sarasota Architectural Foundation's fourth annual SarasotaMOD Weekend in November 10, 11 and 12, 2017.
"I hope to give them their money's worth," he said. "I could tell them stories about architecture all night long. There are endless tales about Sarasota in the old days. I might mention the disaster of the bayfront drive, which really destroyed Sarasota. That was a bad idea." — Harold Bubil
No comments:
Post a Comment