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HUTSELL'S LAKEWOOD
BY WILLIS CECIL WINTERS, AIA
Clifford Dorris Hutsell designed and built
fifty houses in Lakewood between I926 and
I94I, an era for Dallas of prolific growth
between two world wars, interrupted only by the
impact of the Great Depression. As a builder,
Hutsell played a critical role in fulfilling the young
city's manifest destiny of the I920S eastward
expansion to the alluring shores of White Rock
Lake. As an architect, he designed fanciful and
eclectic residences-most of them in a highly personalized
Spanish Eclectic style-which, over
time, would come to establish the cognitive image
not only of Lakewood Boulevard, but of the surrounding
neighborhood as well.
Born in Grapevine, Texas, in I893, C. D. Hutsell
was a talented, intuitive designer, and like
many practicing architects of his generation, had
no formal architectural education. Unlike his contemporaries,
however, Hutsell also eschewed
formal training as a draftsman, relying instead
on his considerable, pragmatic experience as a
carpenter. This would explain, on the one hand,
his somewhat naive, romantic and picturesque
compositions unencumbered by historicist baggage,
and on the other hand, his complete mastery
of the craftsmanship evident in all of his
Lakewood houses.
For Hutsell, Lakewood represented the third
major phase of his career as an architect-builder.
While Country Club Estates was being developed,
beginning in 1922, by Albert Dines and Lee
Kraft, on rolling farm land north of Lakewood
Country Club, Hutsell was in the midst of his
first significant construction campaign in South
Dallas: a series of modest Prairie-style houses,
C. D. Hutsell
Craftsman bungalows, and Tudor cottages on
Park Row. The success of this initial entrepreneurial
endeavor, combined with the impending
build-out of the South Boulevard/Park Row
neighborhood, prompted Hutsell to gradually
shift his operations to Oak Lawn and areas of East
Dallas, ultimately focusing his newly acquired
skills and steadily increasing financial capabilities
on two blocks of Mercedes Avenue.
According to the pattern he established on
Park Row, and would later repeat in Lakewood,
Hutsell purchased nineteen residential lots in the
30
