| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property named 'Fred B. Jones Estate (Penwern)'. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
GOTHIC WINDOWS IN FRONT DORMERS.
Photo code #1 is: NR 151. J photo roll (#2 & 3) refers to J.A. Sewell negatives. See also Jeff Dean's personal file for photo 10/72b. Penwern Estate of 1900-03 includes a house, a boathouse, a stable, and a gate lodge, all designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Gate lodge - 1903, boathouse - 1900, house - 1901, stable - 1903.
Penwern has several Welsh meanings, but is possibly tied into the name of Wright’s maternal grandmother’s ancestral home in Wales, a cottage with a similar name. Penwern was one of Wright’s first projects on Delavan Lake. As usual, Wright took full advantage of the natural setting. The living room opens onto a broad porch, across the full length of the house’s main block, offering a panoramic lake view. Long side-gabled roofs with wide eaves seem to make the two-story house hug the ground. The horizontal siding and the extremely broad semi-elliptical arches at the porch entry and the porte-cochère underscore the low-slung effect. Uncoursed rubble in the porch piers and walls visually ties the house to the earth. The porte-cochère, with a covered walkway overhead, links the main block to an annex, in which a second-story tower thrusts through the roofline like an arrow.
Fred Jones, a wealthy Chicago businessman and a bachelor, commissioned Penwern to accommodate his lavish summer parties. Besides the spacious living room, with its high, beamed ceiling and its broad-arched brick fireplace (echoing the arches outside), the first floor also featured billiards and dining rooms. Partygoers could also use the porch or head upstairs to an indoor balcony overlooking the living and dining rooms. For late-night poker games, the men retreated to the tower annex. Five upstairs bedrooms accommodated overnight guests.
The estate originally included a stables a boathouse, which fell victim to arson in 1978 but was rebuilt c. 2002 according to Wright's original plans; and a substantial gatehouse, which housed Jones’s caretaker and more guests. Visible from the street, the gate lodge features two dormers, each embracing pairs of pointed windows. A side-gabled porte cochère shelters the entrance to the estate and connects this gatehouse to a tower that stored water for an attached greenhouse, which no longer stands. |
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