This was the first of the grand houses built by Frank Yount's associates in the Yount-Lee Oil Company. Although it began as the Yount Rothwell Oil Company, Talbott F. Rothwell brought in his father-in-law, Houston oilman T. P. Lee, as the company's major financial backer. While the Rothwell house was not quite as expensive as the Phelan house ( BM22) , the three-story, limestone-surfaced house, designed and built by Russell Brown Company of Houston, is ponderous. Because it is not elevated on a terrace like the Phelan house, it does not exert the same kind of presence on its spacious but flat site.
Behind the Rothwell House at 135 Caldwood Drive East is the Greenspan House of 1959 by Beaumont architect D. Rex Goode, which appears to float above its site. During the 1930s, Thomas Road became the preferred site for large houses on large, flat lots shaded by dense stands of pine trees, the totemic tree of east Texas. At 735 Thomas Road is a 1950s house that was extensively altered and refaced in a high-style Georgian manner in 1980 by New Orleans architects Koch and Wilson. It is the only building in Texas designed by the distinguished architect, historian, and preservationist Samuel Wilson Jr.