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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead ) -
(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )
Finn designed this house to maximize its presence on Galveston Bay. Ross S. Sterling, a cofounder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company and a Houston banker, newspaper publisher, and real estate developer, was governor of Texas from 1931 to 1933. From his monumental rear portico Sterling could look eastward across Galveston and Trinity bays toward Chambers County, where he had been born in circumstances considerably more humble than those in which he lived at Bay Ridge. Based on the design of a country house outside Cleveland by New York City architect Charles A. Platt—and bearing, as Sterling's neighbors noted, a distinct resemblance to the White House—this cream limestone– faced “cottage” would not have been out of place in the real Newport. On its open site, it gives motorists on Bay Ridge Road a sense of the lateral expanse of Galveston Bay.