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A look inside late Dallas architect Ron Wommack’s AIA-award-winning shelter near Oak Lawn

The architect, who died June 30, designed the stone, glass and steel compound as his own residence.

Editor’s note: In 2009, The Dallas Morning News featured the Oak Lawn-area residence of architect Ron Wommack. It was a house of his own design and it won an award from the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Wommack died Sunday, June 30, 2024, at the age of 73. We’re bringing back an edited version of this story to celebrate his work and legacy.

Neighbors hardly knew what to think when the linear stone, glass and steel compound started going up on the once-weedy corner lot.

After all, this was the ungentrified end of Douglas Avenue. Modest single-story houses were the norm in Clifton Place, a neighborhood just west of Oak Lawn.

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What was it going to be? The view from the street: dual concrete boxes forming a two-car garage on the right, and, on the left, a glass-walled main structure. Each was topped with a steeply slanting roof of steel pipe columns and slatted beams that cantilevered out on one side, dappling everything underneath in shadows.

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Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area....
Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area. The home won a Dallas AIA award.(Charles Davis Smith / 135153)

On the street side of the quarter-acre lot, a concrete-block wall created the urban equivalent of an Old World courtyard, with gated entryways on either end forming a breezeway. The south-facing gate also served as front entry, framing a postcard view of downtown’s skyscrapers.

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With landscaping yet to come, the structure had a vaguely commercial look. (The heavy glass doors and expansive windows were originally manufactured for retail storefronts.) There was speculation it would be everything from a dental office to a mechanic’s garage. One man even stopped by to apply for a job.

All of which amused Ron Wommack. The Dallas architect designed the project as his own home.

The result was a sharp contrast to Wommack’s commissioned projects, which included modernist rehabs of downtown’s Mitchell Lofts and Powerstation condos.

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“When you get an opportunity to do something for yourself,” he said at the time, “you can make it as structural as you want without having to add in a lot of design flourishes.”

Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area....
Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area. The home won a Dallas AIA award.(Charles Davis Smith / 135153)

And that may be what drew the attention of the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which named Wommack’s inner-city marvel best in show in its 2008 design competition. Among the judges was LA-based architect Thom Mayne, the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner who designed the Perot Museum of Nature & Science building.

“It’s beautiful without any sense of decadence,” said Mayne of the home’s simplicity and restraint in an era of excess. “It emphasizes quality over quantity, which is not an American aesthetic at all. I found it magnificently detailed.”

Of course, the Wommack house was way beyond a vanity project. It was home.

More than a year after moving in, Wommack and his former wife were still fussing with Ron’s growing collection of Noguchi lamps and hunting the perfect Knoll fabric to recover a set of vintage Mies van der Rohe “Brno” chairs.

Sitting in the garden in the afternoons, Wommack would take note of the chipper mockingbirds in the lull between a jet plane rumbling toward Love Field and a big rig jostling down nearby Maple Avenue.

It was the simple life, urban remix.

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“We wanted to see what we could really boil everything down to,” Wommack said at the time, his eyes framed by owlish black glasses de rigueur for architects from Le Corbusier to Philip Johnson to I.M. Pei. “What is the bare minimum we think we can live with?”

Architect Ron Wommack in his Dallas Home in 2009.
Architect Ron Wommack in his Dallas Home in 2009.(Carter Rose)

Turns out, 1,675 square feet — space that visually doubled thanks to glass walls that looked out onto the courtyard of bamboo, grass and limestone quarried in Lueders, Texas.

Sustainability was another theme. Wommack, an Abilene native who trained under Texas minimalist masters Bud Oglesby and Frank Welch, tipped his own hat here to regional architecture by sourcing as many local materials as possible. Even the German Rheinzink metal used for the home’s exposed skeleton arrived by way of the Granbury, Texas, courthouse, which had just enough of the material left after a renovation.

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Wommack based the home’s design on the time-honored concept of a feather and a stone: “The stone is what anchors it to the site, giving it a gravity and earthiness. The feather is the steel structure that sort of hovers above it, and the glass, which is very ephemeral and light. It’s the paradox of the two qualities that gives the space a kind of tension, an edge.”

Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area....
Late Dallas architect Ron Wommack's former residence of his own design in the Oak Lawn area. The home won a Dallas AIA award.(Charles Davis Smith / 135153)