Denver Magazine / April 2010 / Homeless Architect

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Homeless Architect

Eugene Groves had no one style to call his own. And near the end of his life, he may not have had a home of his own.

“Absolutely, positively the most unique house you will ever see!” reads the real estate ad listing. And this may be one home that justifies the hype.

A domed roof ringed with tiles is the first hint that something is different. It feels Classical, Mediterranean, like an observatory. An outside stairway is itself unusual and elegant with its curlicue supports.

The front door leads into the living room. At the far end is a concrete platform built into the wall that is barely able to fit a person. The platform brushes up against a window and can be sealed off from the rest of the house with sliding wooden doors. At another end of the living room, which hosts the dome, is a fireplace. Stand at the fireplace and say something; the words carry over the dome, sounding as if you are right next to the person across the room.

The kitchen is an array of differently sized cupboards and drawers covered in stainless steel with funky, rounded corners. A table and countertops are also rounded and concrete. The kitchen has rightly been likened to a Union Pacific streamliner, although an Airstream trailer and ship’s galley also come to mind.

Upstairs, an office area looks out over the dome and includes a built-in safe (the combo comes with the deed). There’s also a closet, but you have to walk onto the desk to get to it. Two dressing rooms — his and hers — are like train cabins. Another puzzling, concrete platform with shallow indentation that can be sealed off with sliding doors is on the second floor.

This north Denver home is one of four existing local residences built by one of Colorado’s most unusual architects: Eugene Groves. His signature was rounded corners and concrete, down to the bookcases, closets, cabinets, and door and window frames. One historical analysis of a Groves house says it “was as much sculpted as built.”

Beds were also concrete — and that is what those puzzling concrete platforms are. Combined with the sliding doors, Groves called them “lounges” and “health sleeping units” and apparently saw their airflow as a way to promote good health.

Since the 1935 Sherman House has come up for sale (at $339,900), it has renewed interest in Groves but also opened up the danger zone for many historic and unusual structures: Can they survive? Indeed, while it appears Groves designed his homes for permanency and healing, the structures themselves sometimes fight for survival. A domed, high school gymnasium he designed in Aurora was demolished. A gas station and lunch counter featured in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was saved from the wrecking ball but remains in disrepair. One of the last times a Groves house in Denver went up for sale, it was leveled.

“It’s kind of sad,” says local sculptor Carroll Hansen, a defender of Groves who has studied him for some 40 years. “I don’t think it will happen, but it is one of those potential scrapers. It’s pretty rigid. You have to learn to live with it,” says Hansen of the Sherman House.

Groves died in 1967, and the few newspaper stories that mention him barely touch upon the intriguing nature of his work. “Is it Pueblan? One book says Mediterranean; there’s a little Art Deco, a little Art Nouveau,” says Rosemary Stoffel of Historic Denver.

Chuck Murphy, the owner-realtor who has painstakingly preserved the Sherman House, shows it to seasoned real estate people who think they’ve seen it all. “They just go, ‘Wow,’” he says. Murphy is determined to save the house, but it may take a buyer as unique as the building itself.

Groves’ life story — and the mythology surrounding it — is as intriguing as his architecture. He grew up in a small town, learned his trade at Harvard University, and moved to Denver to save his life from tuberculosis. He designed 19 buildings on the campus of Colorado State University–Fort Collins by one count and has more than a dozen buildings across the state on historic registers. Despite his seeming success, Groves may have collapsed on the streets of Denver from starvation.

Thomas Edison’s Bright Idea: The Concrete House

Eugene G. Groves was born in Dana, Indiana, February 9, 1882, and worked as a bookkeeper for the Overland Automobile Company in Terre Haute, according to one news report. He won a scholarship to study architecture at Harvard in a national design contest and practiced in New York.

Around the same time, in 1906, Thomas Edison declared concrete houses the wave of the future. “They would be fireproof, insect-proof, easy to clean,” according to an article on Discovery.com. “The walls could be pre-tinted in attractive colors and would never need to be repainted. Everything from shingles to bathtubs to picture frames would be cast as a single monolith of concrete, in a process that took just a few hours. Extra stories could be added with a simple adjustment of the molding forms. Best of all, the $1,200-dollar houses would be cheap enough for even the poorest slum-dwellers to afford.” The concrete homes have gone down as a disaster, unwieldy to build and quite ugly.

No one can say for sure what, if any, influence Edison had on Groves or how he came to blend so many architectural styles. Fear of death from tuberculosis, however, may have played a clearer role in Groves’ life. Newspaper stories have Groves practicing in Indiana in 1911 but living in Denver by 1914. Sunshine and clean, dry air were said to be a cure for TB.

Hansen says he heard Groves first ran a dance hall (Groves loved to dance) while building up his architectural practice. The state Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation lists Groves’ first work as a 1915 running track at CSU.

Missing from that list is a house at 124 High Street in Denver’s Country Club neighborhood attributed to Groves in the book Denver the City Beautiful and Its Architects. The book describes the 1918 Wight House as a standout example of Pueblo Revival architecture, a style known for its “soft corners.” The house had a “plastered exterior, flat roofs, vigas [projecting roof beams], and stepped-back upper stories.” A prominent front arch and skylight seem to hint at Groves’ future in domes and round corners.

Bob Danos bought the house in 1989, hoping to build it up and expand it. But he says the structure would not support the additions. Danos tore it down and built what he calls a New Orleans Revival home in the style of his hometown. The traditional-looking mansion fits in easily with the neighborhood.

Groves’ Interpretation: The Lounge House

A 1932 house on South Josephine Street near the University of Denver is the earliest known surviving Groves residence. It was featured in the March 1938 edition of the magazine Homes of the West. “Mrs. [Mary] Holland is a social-welfare worker; she had long dreamed of a home of her own that would at the end of the professional day be a haven of beauty, comfort and convenience,” according to the story “A Low-Mileage House in Denver.”

“Mr. Groves found in this client’s commission his first opportunity to actualize his ideas of what he calls ‘the lounge house’…” The story goes on to explain, the “construction to ensure economy and permanency — as the house is fireproof no insurance is needed; room arrangement to assure utilization of every square inch of space, thus providing the ‘low mileage.’” In a possible nod to his obsession with health, Groves called the kitchen a “food laboratory.” The health sleeping unit is described as “an alcove just large enough to accommodate the bed, with maximum control of air and light conditions during sleeping hours by means of a large outer window.”

Tuberculosis patients were encouraged to sleep outdoors to take full advantage of the supposedly healing air, and like the motorcycle sidecars of home building, the units seem to have facilitated that. Outside stairways that lead to patios also seem to emphasize fresh air.

But that does not fully explain the otherworldly nature of Groves’ homes. The Classical domes may be in line with his Harvard training. “But rather than adopt any one style, Groves created one all his own, amalgamating the Classical with the whimsical, the Moderne with the Colonial,” the magazine Modern in Denver notes. The book Denver Going Modern says, “While direct precedents are difficult to find, Groves’ work partakes of early 20th Century Art Nouveau designs, as well as later expressionistic and futuristic concoctions. The result has been called both exciting and ridiculous.”

Shirley Kenneally and her husband bought the Holland House in 1967, and she was at first embarrassed because the dome was so unusual (although most of the house is square on the outside). Inside, some corners are neither square nor rounded but angled. Kenneally does not use the health sleeping unit but says there are those who have called it cozy. Kenneally now embraces the house, and the 74-year-old says, “I’ll probably live here until I’m no longer alive.”

She and Stoffel, with Historic Denver, are working to get the home landmark status. “We really want to protect it from being torn down,” Stoffel says. “The house has always intrigued people,” she says. “It’s like nothing else in the neighborhood. The house is mysterious.”

The Mystery of the Rounded Corner

Groves’ progression into rounded corners is unclear. Hansen theorizes that Groves discovered he could more easily remove concrete from rounded molds. Possibly the last living person to know Groves is Lozelle Munson, a 95-year-old retired carpenter who lives in north Denver. Munson worked with Groves from 1936 to 1941, and when I ask why the round corners, Munson gives the response he gives to a lot of questions I ask: “I don’t know.”

Groves’ rounded, concrete style blooms in the 1938 Nordlund House in Hilltop, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The house has a dome, and inside, thick stairway pillars with decorative circles add an Art Deco flair. The house appears to be two stories but actually has seven interior levels given various stairways and inclines.

Parts of the house, including health sleeping units that have since been removed, were miserably cold, say current owners Elizabeth and John Carver, who installed a new heating system. Cellphone signals cannot bust through the concrete and, “I’m sure we have the only house in Hilltop without a dishwasher,” says John.

John does not believe the homes have healing powers. “Are you crazy?” he says, but adds, “It can be an incredibly delightful and charming place.”

The Haunted House

Munson and Hansen have a number of anecdotes about Groves. He polished his nails; wore tan, leather gloves to protect his hands; and liked to buy new Oldsmobile coupes and drive them fast. He was a fussy eater, strictly opposed to smoking, and attended church. Groves was friends with prominent businessmen but wasn’t a personable, backslapping kind of guy.

“I never saw him when he wasn’t all business,” Munson says. “It wasn’t anyone you’d like to go to the racetrack with.”

Groves had a wife, according to Munson and Hansen. But that marriage ended, and Hansen says Groves later had a girlfriend, the now deceased Minnie Browne. Hansen describes Browne as a bookkeeper who was “very plain and ordinary, easy-going and quiet.”

While Groves’ homes remain a wonderland of speculation and architecture, CSU provided the more steady, traditional work. A 2007 article about the 1948 Student Services Building in the CSU Rocky Mountain Collegian newspaper calls it one of “several buildings on campus that could be haunted.” The paper talks of the “sociopath architect who lurks [the building’s] winding, impractically built hallways.” The Collegian and Greeley Tribune repeat tall tales that Groves went crazy during construction, threatened to kill his wife, and was committed to an insane asylum. “There is no official record of Groves going mental or any hard evidence that he had grave plans involving his wife,” the Tribune acknowledges.

Hansen notes the building was conceived as a dorm. Groves believed beds and desks would be concrete built-ins, so there would be no need for halls and stairways to accommodate moving furniture. The school then vetoed the built-ins, but the halls and stairways never changed (a story a former and current CSU architect cannot verify).

Hansen and Munson dismiss the idea that Groves went crazy as does Don Etter, author of Denver Going Modern. Etter is fascinated that so many stories can crop up about one man. “He led a very professional life. How did he have time to go insane?” asks Etter.

Sliding off the Radar

Yet Hansen does attribute the loss of work at CSU to the beginning of Groves’ reported financial downfall. Why Groves fell off the CSU radar, however, is unclear.

Groves designed the 1952 Eckley Gym and Auditorium Building, according to the Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. The next — and final — listing of his work is the Fort Morgan City Police Building, but no date is given. Groves would have been 70 in 1952, and Historic Preservation acknowledges that its list is partial. But that leaves the last 15 years of Groves’ architectural life, and most of his personal affairs, officially blank.

Hansen says Groves took what he could get. “When he was desperate, how many homes or little remodel jobs did he do?” he asks. “Ten? 20? We’ll never know.”

Groves was eventually reduced to asking other architects for money, claims Hansen, based on information a secretary in the Denver office of the American Institute of Architects shared with him decades ago. The owner of a downtown office building gave Groves free space. Yet things got so bad that Groves began living there. He skimped on food and collapsed in the streets near The Brown Palace.

Around two years before Groves’ death, Lozelle Munson heard Groves was in a nursing home and went to visit. Groves was sitting on the front porch. The man who was normally “neat as a pin” now had food stains on his dress shirt. Munson talked about building permits just to have something to say. Groves paced. After 15 minutes, Munson left. If Groves noticed Munson leave, he never acknowledged it.

Groves died at Park Central Nursing Home at age 85. A probate court filing shows that Minnie Browne, “friend and creditor,” petitioned to collect the $41 to his name.



A Living History Lesson

Another Groves project lives on in Colorado. In 1936, on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, the Washington County School Board moved to build a new high school gymnasium in Akron. The board settled on Groves. A local paper called him “extremely well-known and reliable,” according to a report for the National Register of Historic Places. “The school district also chose Groves for his innovative use of concrete materials.”

The completed gym featured a dome with skylights. Some 600 people attended the 1939 dedication. “According to the Akron Newsreporter, attendees were ‘unanimous in the opinion that the new building was one of the most beautiful that has been built in Akron or northeastern Colorado,’” the National Register report said.

But, in 1964, a new high school and gym went up in another part of town. The gym designed by Groves remained an auxiliary gathering place. Lexin Brent grew up in Akron and, as a child, went there for pee-wee wrestling and bobbing for apples at Halloween. “It was just always there, and I never really gave it much thought,” he says, “until I was out of [high] school and needed a place to live.”

Brent, now 23, bought the building. “The domed gymnasium is one of a kind. The construction is one of a kind. The quality is one of a kind,” he says.

Washington County Assessor records show he purchased it for $1,000 in 2006. In 2008, it was listed on the National Register. In 2009, Brent had his wedding reception there.

Brent now works as a mechanic in Nebraska but has undertaken what he calls “probably a lifetime project” to renovate the gym and possibly live and work there. An upstairs superintendent’s office will probably be the bedroom. Wooden lockers (where football players signed their names) could be shelves.

The purchase has also been a living history lesson. Elderly residents have told Brent of attending class there and carrying out pranks. He talked to a man who helped build the gym.

“It gives you a feeling of being part of an earlier time,” Brent says of the building. “It makes you feel proud because these people were craftsmen. They had innovative thinking and it inspires you to do good work.”