The Art Nouveau style arrived in Texas in 1910 with the completion of this imposing house for merchant, banker, and civic leader Rufus Scott. His wife, Margaret, solicited designs for a new house from a number of architects, among them, J. Riely Gordon and Wees. The Scotts first brought Wees to Paris in 1909 to design their new house, and then, following the 1916 fire, to design a commercial building on the town plaza (MC38).
Wees’s European background is evident in the five scroll gables, which interrupt a massive, deeply overhanging red tile roof, highly detailed foliate ornamentation in terra-cotta, and in the columns and pilasters at the entrance portal and three-sided veranda. Within the house, the stair hall is rich in Vienna Secession–styled detailing and geometry. The thirty-room house included a ballroom on the third floor, a porte-cochere, and an extant, gabled carriage house located to the north of the house.
Opposite the Scott House, at the corner of S. Church and W. Sherman streets, is an exceptional masonry Prairie Style house (c. 1920) with a symmetrical center-hall plan with massive brick pillars marking the entrance to the wraparound porch. Exposed rafter tails animate the eaves.