| The homes in Rockhill gardens
have a unique combination of materials like brick, stone
and timbered stucco. These homes exemplify the commitment
to excellence of Napoleon W. Dible, a legend in local Kansas
City home builders, where he was know for his individual
style, attention to detail and affordability.
Dible all but created the speculative home-building business
in Kansas City. That is, he bought land and built houses
without first securing buyers. He started his business here
in 1905 and quickly became the most successful builder of
single-family homes in the area. Dible studied and designed
his homes to appeal to women of the era with apparent features
such as oversized bedroom closets, built in shoes racks
and extensive plaster detailing in the formal rooms.
Since its inception in 1929, Rockhill Gardens has grown
into an active neighborhood community. Over five hundred
homes were built through 1945, the majority being English
Tudor style or two story Colonial.
Arches are in nearly every room on the main floor of Royce
Baker's 1933 Tudor in Kansas City.Two identical doorways
curve up into dramatic peaks and flank the interior wall
of her living room. One leads to the dining room, the other
to the staircase. Another arched doorway frames the entryway,
which is big enough to tuck a small table and lamp inside.
Yet another connects the dining room to the kitchen. "They
make the house look so charming and cozy," a resident
says. "They add to the storybook look of the style
on the inside."
The tale of Kansas City's Tudor Revival houses begins and
ends with a local builder's love for them.
Napoleon William Dible felt like he was handing the moon
on a silver platter to homeowners with the easy-to-build,
easy-to-sell style. He constructed his homes with characteristics
of Tudor mansions he'd admired: towering chimneys, steep
gabled roofs and decorative half timbering. Most of these
were tiny by today's standards, having about 1,500 square
feet.
"But he called them mini-mansions," says his
grandson, William Hickok, a retired builder who worked for
Dible. "It's his signature house."
The Tudor was also the style nationally in the 1920s, and
because it was among the first styles to have detached garages,
it is often considered the "automobile house".
Shortly after World War I, one Model T rolled off the production
line every 20 seconds. Porches moved from the front of the
house to the side and were screened to "shield"
residents from car pollution.
Hollywood helped bolster the Tudor's image. The storybook
style was shown on the silver screen, notably in Disney's
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". But at the
same time, the modernist movement was gaining momentum,
rejecting historical references and ornamentation. Architectural
critics decried the Tudor: "Houses or Stage Scenery?"
was one essay's headline. Few were built after 1940.
The end of the Tudor came later for Kansas City and Dible,
who was still building them in 1953, Hickok says.
Dible was often asked: "Aren't the English cottage
days over?" So he tested the waters that year by building
three ranch houses in a new subdivision of Tudors near 78th
Street and Holmes. The ranches sold before they were finished.
"Well, boys," Hickok recalls Dible saying in
his baritone voice, "we're changing".
Arches were popular when Tudor monarchs ruled 1500s England.
Architectural dictionaries define a Tudor arch as a pointed
shape whose sides start with a curve about 60 degrees and
continue to the apex in a straight line. However, a variety
of arch shapes can be found inside Tudor Revival houses,
says Dave Hiers, owner of Tudor Artisans, a company in Gerogia
that handcrafts and sells period items.
"All types of arches, especially in doorways, really
help define the Tudor style," he says.
The front door of Baker's house is a simply rounded arch.
She also has arched decorative niches that are pointier
- similar to the doorway - in the stairway, breakfast nook
and bathroom. Her favorite arched niche is above the 7-foot-wide
plaster fireplace and includes an electrical outlet that's
original to the house for a lamp or clock.
"The details seem to be ahead of their time,"
she says. "Yet I know they're centuries old."
Erma Embry grew up adoring Tudor Revival homes. To her,
they looked like Hansel and Gretel houses with their triangular
lines, arched doors and narrow diamond-pane windows. She
snatched up a brick one a decade ago in Westheight Manor,
a high-style neighborhood near 20th Street and Washington
Boulevard in Kansas City, Kan.
"I finally got my gingerbread house," she says.
Embry loves the 1919 brick house's interior, which features
built-in drawers and two sunrooms. But she, like many revival-style
homeowners, did not know how Tudors made their way to America.
The style is named for the Tudor monarchs of England. Fortified
castles were no longer needed around 1520, when the population
of the country was rising because of improved standards
of living.
At that time, Henry VIII rewarded court favorites with
land in the country. They were rich enough to pay skilled
craftspeople to build decorative wall studs in diamond,
herringbone and star patterns. The working class emulated
the timbering in a scaled-down form and also made use of
local stone for their cottages.
The style faded in the 1700s when cheaper materials and
labor became available, but it came back in favor in the
1860s in England. The humbler abodes, not the sprawling
castlelike manors, were emulated as people sought houses
that blended with the landscape. Period fiction writers
wrote about their appeal, helping to spread the style.
The Tudor made its way to America in the 1890s but didn't
take off until after World War I. It was the popularity
of the automobile that jumpstarted the Tudor boom in the
1920s. Cars allowed people who worked in the urban core
to live farther away, sparking a home-building boom. At
the same time, people of Anglo-Saxon descent, wishing to
distance themselves from a growing immigrant population
in the city, sought to showcase their own heritage in their
homes.
Throughout Kansas City and across the country, builders
began naming subdivisions and shopping centers after British
places to capitalize on the sentiment. "There was this
whole sense of creating English villages," says William
Worley, a historian and adjunct professor at the University
of Missouri-Kansas City. "The Tudor style fit that
better than any other style."
The tony trappings so attracted H. O. Peet (of Colgate-Palmolive-Peet)
that he carved a soap block model of it and planned to build
his own. However, he eventually bought the home.
"One just has to look around to see Kansas City has
one of the best and the most numerous collections of Tudors
anywhere in America," says Mike Tecton, a house-plan
book publisher in Virginia and a Tudor Revival expert.
Napoleoan William Dible built most of the Tudors in the
Kansas City area. He built a few basic floor plans of mostly
small and moderate-sized houses. Even though they were replicated
hundreds of times, a homeowner thought his or her dwelling
was unique in the neighborhood.
From house to house, Dible would alternate kitchens left
and right, locate front doors in different spots and add
extra roof peaks.
Nationally, the Tudor style is considered masculine and
so associated with financial achievement and conservative
taste that it was dubbed the "Stockbroker Tudor".
"The plaster, stone and heavy timbers were attractive
to lordly and baronial personalities, giving them fake roots",
says Bo Sullivan, a historian and buyer for Rejuvenation,
a period lighting company in Portland, Oregon.
But Dible, Worley says, was a smart businessman and gave
Kansas City Tudors feminine appeal. As home appliances were
becoming all the rage, he pored over copies of The Ladies'
Home Journal and talked to women about what they wanted.
The result: built-in ironing boards, laundry chutes and
ice-cream-colored tiles for bathrooms and the entryway.
On the exterior, Tudors received extra touches such as foundation
landscaping and curving front walkways to give them curb
appeal.
"Dible understood something that Nichols didn't,"
says Worley, author of J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of
Kansas City. "It was the man who signed the contract,
but it was the woman who made the final desision."
Although most Kansas City Tudors were constructed inexpensively,
they have thrived and few have been demolished. The exteriors
are relatively unchanged except many screened porches are
now all-glass sunrooms. Often, tiny breakfast nooks got
the heave-ho to make way for bigger and better kitchens.
"Tudors are relatively well built here," Worley
says. "They've held up well over the years."
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