Both Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright claimed credit for designing this beachfront cottage. By the late nineteenth century, a mere twenty-four-hours by Pullman Car separated Chicago from Ocean Springs, making it attractive to such prosperous northerners as lumbermen James Charnley and Fred Norwood seeking escape from midwestern winters. In 1890, the Charnleys and their friend, Sullivan, purchased adjacent plots. Sullivan built a bungalow with a cistern-tower plus servant quarters and stables (no longer extant). The Charnleys built a similar bungalow, an octagonal guesthouse, and stables (the last no longer extant).
Thirty years after his first visit to Ocean Springs with the Charnleys, Sullivan wrote in The Autobiography of an Idea (1924) that he “planned for two shacks or bungalows, 300 feet apart, with stables far back.” Wright, who served as Sullivan’s principal designer from 1888 to 1893, wrote in his Genius and the Mobocracy (1949) that in the early 1890s Sullivan “remained away for six weeks at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in the country house I had designed for him,” and that Sullivan’s rose garden was “next door to his beloved friends the Charnleys for whom I had drawn a cottage.” Without additional evidence, most historians view the Ocean Springs buildings as collaborations between the two architects.
Fred and Lizzie Norwood purchased the Charnley property in 1896, but in March 1897 the house burned, possibly to the ground. The Norwoods immediately rebuilt. Evidence suggests that Sullivan provided the plans (four years after Wright left his office) and that the Norwoods moved the octagonal guesthouse from its site east of the main house to the west side.
As rebuilt, the Charnley-Norwood House presumably replicates much of the earlier house. It has a T-shaped plan with living quarters to the front and middle, servants’ spaces, a kitchen, and storage to the rear. Twenty-seven exterior doors enhance cross ventilation, as do the many windows, including those in the semi-octagonal bays at the corners of the front bedrooms. A ventilation monitor with operable baffles on the roof of the double-height kitchen produces an interior effect more akin to a chapel than a kitchen. A photograph taken before the first house burned does not show the monitor, suggesting that Sullivan added it after the fire. The curlypine paneling throughout the house’s primary rooms likely came from Norwood’s mills near Brookhaven.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed Sullivan’s house and lifted the Charnley-Norwood House off its piers, breaking its sills and partially collapsing the front section. Assisted by volunteers from across the country, salvage operations began almost immediately under the direction of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Initially threatened with demolition, the Charnley-Norwood House has been restored under state ownership and is open to the public.