Harrie Thomas Lindeberg architectural drawings

Harrie Thomas Lindeberg (1879-1959) was a New York based society architect whose simple, clean-lined country home designs were significant in setting the style for early 20th century domestic American architecture. During his career he designed more than a hundred country houses, numerous suburban dwellings, and a smattering of public buildings.

Born April 10, 1879 in Bergen Point, New Jersey of Swedish immigrant parents, little is known of Lindeberg’s early years. He acquired his architectural training through an apprenticeship, from 1901 to 1906, at McKim, Mead and White, the leading architectural firm of the American Renaissance in New York. Lindeberg’s work bears the lasting stamp of that tradition. In 1906 Lindeberg and his colleague, Lewis Colt Albro left the firm and opened their own New York architectural office. Aided by Albro’s social connections and later, those of Lindeberg’s second wife, they became architects to a new wealthy elite who were looking for symbols of leisure and success. Lindeberg’s style was known for its simplicity and warmth. Steeply pitched roofs, vernacular materials, and bare hints of older European architectural vocabulary differentiated Lindeberg’s homes from those of more traditional styles.

With the onset of World War I, Lindeberg joined the air corps. After the war, he resumed his practice in New York but found that more socially advantaged competitors including Charles Platt and John Russell Pope, had sewn up the premium commissions for social register homes along the eastern seaboard. It was then that Lindeberg discovered clients in the Midwest, South, and Gulf Coast regions. His imprimatur as a New York society architect with a strong record in country house work appealed to the new barons of the east Texas oil boom.

In Houston, before World War I, Stephen Cullinan (1860-1937), the founder of Texaco, envisioned a park-like enclave near Rice University and Hermann Park. He hired St. Louis landscape architect George E. Kessler to lay out the new Shadyside area. In 1919 he offered lots for sale to a select group of friends and associates. One of the friends, stockbroker Hugo V. Neuhaus (father of noted domestic architect Hugo V. Neuhaus Jr.), chose Harrie Lindeberg as his architect. The drawings for Neuhaus’ house constitute this collection.

Neuhaus also persuaded three of his friends, oilman William Stamps Farish, cotton exporter Kenneth E. Womack, and industrialist D.D. Peden to hire Harrie Lindeberg to design their homes.

Excerpted from Domestic architecture of H.T. Lindeberg by H. T. Lindeberg and originally published in 1940.