The house’s entry door and platform, which is adjacent to several openable flaps—the well-known signature of Paul Rudolph’s Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island in Florida. © 2015 Photo by Brandt Dayton, used with permission.
Did you ever notice that some houses just evoke love from their owners (and especially those who grow-up in them)? When we encounter the owners of Paul Rudolph houses (or their grown-up children), that’s just the sort of reaction we hear—over and over. It says something about an architect that the homes he’s created elicits these warm reactions.
That certainly seems to be the case with Paul Rudolph’s Walker Guest House: we now have evidence that three generations loved it!
In our previous post—prompted by the immanent sale of the house—we linked to a wonderful interview with a Walker family member, Marina Dayton, who had grown-up in the house—and it was made even more intriguing by the fact that she went to Yale (in the educational environment which Paul Rudolph had designed) and she became a talented architect.
Dr. Walter Walker—a member of the wealthy, public-spirited Minneapolis-based family that had created the Walker Art Center—commissioned Paul Rudolph to design the guest house at the beginning of the 1950’s.
When Dr. Walker remarried, his wife brought several children to their new family, and as part of that family, Tian Dayton came to know and love the Walker Guest House. She later brought her own children to experience the house (and to learn to love it too).
But let Tian Dayton tell the story…
The Walker Guest House
“My own memories of WGH date back to my first time in it, I was around 20 and visited Mom and Walt on my spring vacation. I remember most how beautiful the guest house was. The floors were this cool, rubber material in a lovely slate gray, I couldn’t get over how beautiful rubber could look. And there were captain’s chairs when at that time you only really saw them on boats. And a very nubby, interesting wall hanging. And it was all so serene and balanced. I marveled at it actually, it spoke its own language. It was design that taught you how to see, how to live.
I slept on the couch in the living room and they had the little bedroom. The rite of passage was that every morning we put the flaps up and every evening we put them back down again. It was a two-person job so the house is kind of like being crew on a boat, and Rudolph used weights, big, red iron balls and pulleys and figure eight knots like you use to secure a boat. So that was an all-consuming ritual twice a day after which you needed a cup of coffee or a soft pillow, respectively.
The Walker Guest House’s exterior flaps were infinitely adjustable, and could go from completely closed -to- nearly fully parallel to the ground. Here the house is shown with the flaps about 2/3rds up. Photo by Michael Berio © Real Tours. Used with permission.
I would then head outside and stay out pretty much the whole day.
Walt had some crab traps he’d set up on the beach and a few canvas folding chairs. That was it but it felt like a funny, little paradise, all carefully curated by Walt on a scrubby little patch of beach. At the time I was a student at Cal Arts so I was moved by the artiness and simplicity of it all, all of Walt’s “found objects”. Walt made little Calder-esque mobiles of stuff he found on the beach and these wood collages of old junk he found and then he turned into art. Cigarette packs, bones, pieces of glass. This kind of stuff. I walked on the beach with him most days as he told me which shells were which. At that time the shelling was just heavenly, there would be mounds and mounds of jingle shells, cat’s paws, tulips, conches….immature little olive shells. I loved the immature ones best, they made me feel a little older. And sandpipers making tiny little foot prints sailing around in droves on the sand. Sea gulls. Open, open beaches. It was old school, before people were into building ridiculous, air-conditioned beach houses that they never left. Before they stared out of a plate glass window at the ocean and thought that was enough. The idea with Rudolph was that you were living in half nature, indoor-outdoor. In a tent sort of. That you were part of the experience of being alive in the world, not just looking at it. That your senses were brought in.
Even in the house’s one modest-sized bedroom, a feeling of spaciousness fully opens out to the landscape. Photo by Michael Berio © Real Tours. Used with permission.
Years later I married Brandt and we’d bring our children Marina and Alex here in March. They stayed on the floor, practically in the closet and surely on the bed I had slept on. It was just Yia’s and Walt’s house and they were supposed to be careful about tracking sand in. But they were of course influenced by being right on the ocean and searching for shells and making a million sand candles and out running the sandpipers, Alex’s favorite activity as a little guy. By watching each night for the green flash when the sun was setting. By the soothing sound of sleeping to ocean waves. Alex has his own house now on a bay in The Hamptons where he pretty much does the same thing and it’s a high-design house, Claire Weisz and Mark Yoes.
And Marina went to Yale architecture school and is now an architect, so both of the children have learned to love design. I got a call from her when she was tat Yale…. “Mom, we studied Yia’s and Walt’s guest house today. They call it The Walker Guest House. They talk about it like it’s a big deal.” We were amused more than anything else that they were studying this guest house as a sort of icon of mid-century architecture when Mom was more preoccupied with “not tracking in sand” then hi-art. But of course everyone loved it.
The house among Sanibel Island’s vegetation. Photo by Michael Berio © Real Tours. Used with permission.
Walt had bought land with his first wife on Sanibel Island when you still had to take a boat to get there, before the causeway. He wanted something to get out of the winter weather and Sanibel was known for its shells and birds and Walt was something of a naturalist at heart. He’d gone to Princeton and then Harvard Medical School where he became a pathologist and he always loved to look at things through a microscope. He got very ill with TB for a year and never went back to being a doctor. He worked with his father managing family properties and so forth. He decided that he wanted to start with something small like a guest house and they’d see how they liked it. He called one of the best architects at that time, Ralph Twitchell, but Twitchell was too busy to take it on. He suggested his new hire, Paul Rudolph as a very promising young architect. WGH turned out to be Rudolph’s first independent commission. Walt being from a family that was used to supporting art and artists was open to giving someone new with talent a chance and the rest is history as they say. Walt’s first wife never made it down there with him and Walt didn’t spend too much time in it alone I don’t think, though some. When he and Mom first got married, they stayed in it for many months each year… amazingly enough. You have to understand that my mother doesn’t like to cook, walk or roam in nature. And you had to walk to a phone booth a quarter mile away to keep in touch. I think Mom hated it and loved it. But being of Greek genes, I suppose the ocean was natural enough to her and somehow they were able to do it, to carve out a spot for themselves, for each other and for us. They didn’t build the main house that Rudolph had also designed but a house that Mom wanted so we could all fit, or many at a time anyway. And Walt was easy about letting her do whatever she wanted to do and letting us pile in like some sort of endless caravan of people, into his world and it turns out into his heart. Towards the end of Walt’s life, I thought I’d say those things you were supposed to make sure got said. We were in his kitchen in Minneapolis and I said, “Walt, do you know how much you have meant to all of us, how important you have been in our lives? Do you know how much we all love you?”
Walt: Arms at his sides characteristically just sitting. “No, can’t say as I do, no.” (You have to understand that Walt would have considered it hubris to say “yes”).
Tian: “Well we do Walt, we feel so lucky.”
Walt: “Well, you know…..you marry a woman….and she has four kids. And they come along. And pretty soon you start thinking they’re your kids, too.”
Tears in my eyes, big hug.
Thank you, Walt.
Meanwhile back to more current times….Marina told us more about The Walker Guest House which was now gaining some distinction in all of our minds. Marina’s own dedication to design has some influences. Marina and Alex had two grandfathers who were very devoted to art and both of the kids like collecting themselves. Walt was part of the family that started The Walker Art Center. It’s a great story really, the Walkers had made their money in lumber and property. They were one of those very civic minded families, like the Dayton’s. Bruce Dayton, Marina’s and Alex’s other grandfather, was part of starting Dayton Hudson and Target and also collected art and gave most of it to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. And Brandt their father has always collected art so design or “aesthetics” have always been front and center. Anyway Walt’s grandfather, T.B Walker bought a lot of art and wanted to donate it to the MIA. The MIA wasn’t able to determine their authenticity on many items, thinking they might be fakes or “in the school of” or whatever. So when they didn’t accept this “generous” offer, TB started The Walker Art Center. Walt said that when they started it, they really wanted it to be part of the community, to enhance people’s lives and to be open to all, a real resource. For this reason, they bought land right in the main drag of town, in Minneapolis, so that people could access it easily and they always had children’s programs and easy admission and all of that. As a family they just had a really great sense of how to give to the community and somehow they understood the importance of art, though they were also part of starting Abbot Northwestern Hospital, Walker Place for older people where Mom lived the last years of her life, Walker Methodist Church, clubs and so on. The family also lured Tyrone Guthrie to Minneapolis by giving him land for his theater, The Guthrie and helping to raise funds for it. So the Walkers and the Daytons have had a lot of impact culturally on Minneapolis. Walt liked telling these stories though he was an incredibly modest man, I mean incredibly modest. And he’d grown up in the depression and never got over the fact that his father sold a building to send him to Princeton. Hence the other side of his interest in preservation. Guilt. Walt preserved EVERYTHING. Including blenders, knives (he never bought new ones he sharpened what he had), cellophane, he kept everything and recycled (even called it that) before anyone even knew it was a concept. He never got anything for himself, though he was completely and always generous to us. Always.
Elaine Walker. Photo courtesy of the Walker family.
For the last several years my husband Brandt and I have spent a month in the guest house visiting Mom who just passed last month. We had our own “digs” as Mom said and we were “close but not on top of each other”. We spent some very important end of life time together staring at the waves and the setting sun. It was moving because her life was setting, too. She swung and reflected and we talked about life. This is how Walt spent his final years, too. In the other swing on that porch.
But back to the guest house. Brandt and I came to look very much forward to pairing down our lives for four weeks and to living on the sand. You wake up in a sort of box. Then the flaps, how many flaps up today, is it a full flap day or is there a cool wind coming from some direction and we should keep that flap down. How much light can we get in, it’s morning so let’s hear the birds sing and feel some sun. But it’s the afternoon light that is really so special. That’s when coming inside feels soothing and the beauty of WGH is that being inside wasn’t really all-together inside, because you were sitting on the ground, in screens and there was a soft breeze….it felt angelic. You could really relax because you were surrounded by nature and it just came into your nap, into your reading, into your doing some exercises or making dinner or whatever. And because the space was so small you just couldn’t get fancy.
A recent view of the relaxed interior of the home. Photo by Michael Berio © Real Tours. Used with permission.
So now we’re selling it and I suppose it’s a little like Emily’s last scene in Wilder’s Our Town. “…..you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. (she asks abruptly through her tears) Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute? (she sighs).” “Saints and Poets, they do some.”
So maybe really beautiful, iconic design turns you into a saint or a poet for a moment but as with most things in life, you can’t really take it all in, life is just too big and mysterious to take all in. But it’s easier on a beach, during sunset. And I suppose that’s where Walt’s vision and Paul Rudolph’s came together, because WGH isn’t just anywhere, it’s on a beach where the sea gulls fly and the shells make art very morning and the breezes are heavenly and the sand is warm. But I do think our family has loved The Walker Guest House and thanks to Walt, it has been well preserved except for Mom’s beige linoleum that “didn’t show the sand as much,” it is pretty much how it always was. Magical.”
Tian Dayton PhD
We are grateful to Dr. Dayton for allowing us to share this lovely memoir of a special place.
The beach—with some chairs to relax on—adjacent to the Walker Guest House. © 2015 Photo by Brandt Dayton, used with permission.