
Insurance executive Herman Gartner and his wife, Elizabeth Reynolds, commissioned Houston architect Staub to design this elaborate residence facing the River Crest Country Club golf course. The Flemish-gabled facade was inspired by an English house Staub observed while traveling in Europe in 1929. The horizontality of the porte-cochere provides counterpoint to the vertical massing of the entrance gable and chimney. Even more intricately detailed than his Houston projects, this brick one-and-a-half-story house is one of several Staub designed in the late 1920s for Fort Worth clients. An elegant detail is the one-foot tall brick landscape wall with stone cap that subtly delineates the public sidewalk from the private precinct of the front garden.