When the Pritchett family tells friends they will soon be sleeping within the same walls as Queen Elizabeth, they don’t mean as house guests of the British monarch.
Rather than visiting England, the Pritchetts are bringing a chunk of Great Britain home. Their new Park Cities, Texas, house is being built out of the same stone the English sovereigns used at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.
“I had gone to Bath in southwest England on a couple of business trips, and I loved the stone there and how it ages to a warm honey color,” said Dallas businessman Price Pritchett. “When we started building our new house, this was the stone we decided to have.”
While the Pritchett house is extraordinary because it uses stone imported from 400-year-old English quarries, a drive through Dallas’ affluent neighborhoods shows that Big D has entered the stone age.
Stone has become the fashionable building material for high-price houses.
“I was nervous doing stone houses when I started three or four years ago
I thought it was just a fad,” said longtime Dallas builder Hershel Pierce. “But more and more people are using it. It’s part of what I think is a rebellion against the status quo.”
In the Dallas area, that has meant brick.
Since the early 1900s, brick has been the preferred building material for homes in the area. From historic Swiss Avenue mansions to 1970s tract houses in Duncanville, brick has dominated the residential market.
But after some flirtations with stucco and the occasional clapboard, Dallas home buyers and builders have become smitten with stone.
“All the way north to Plano, they are doing this,” said custom builder Allen Nixon. “They’ve been building houses this way in Europe forever. Now the style has really caught on in Dallas.”
Keeping up with the Windsors and Rothschilds doesn’t come cheap.
“Natural stone is about twice the cost of brick,” Nixon said.
Dallas residential architect James Langford is using stone exteriors on a complex of free-standing “townhouses” he is doing on Turtle Creek Boulevard.
In that case, the high visibility of the site, wedged between high-rise apartments and Park Cities residential neighborhoods, called for special construction, he said.
“We could not use brick for these homes because it has more of a residential scale,” Langford said. “We needed a material that has a grander appearance.”
So the French-style homes clustered around a private drive will be clad in West Texas limestone.
Langford doesn’t advocate using stone construction in all areas. He shudders at the thought of limestone mini-manses popping up all over the landscape.
“In some North Dallas suburban blocks, it’s out of scale,” he said. “But it says, `Hey! Look how wealthy I am, I am using stone.’ “
Even some production builders such as Centex and Grand Homes are putting stone accents on their nicer products.
“We won’t use it much below $200,000,” said Darling Homes president Bill Darling, because of the cost and the labor involved.
In Pritchett’s case, the design of the house dictated a stone exterior. It’s a replica of a Jacobean-style manor house, complete with leaded windows and a slate roof.
It’s the first time that the Bath Stone Group, which produces and markets the stone worldwide, has sent its product to Texas.
“We have previously exported to America, but mostly to New York and California,” said managing director Nicholas Horton, who was in Dallas to see the first order of stone delivered to the building site.
“It’s going together like a big jigsaw puzzle,” Horton said. “The entire project (erecting the facade) will take another four or five months.”
Of course, even with the best planning there have been hitches.
U.S. Customs officers poked through piles of stone blocks and bags of mortar and stone dust when the shipment got to Houston.
The Bath Stone Group sent over a master mason to help get things started.
“This exterior is the most complicated that I’ve ever seen,” said builder Tony McClung. “We’ve just started, and we have 10 stones laid in three days.
“One thing that complicates things is that they deal in millimeters and we deal in inches,” he said.
Because the stone exterior will have only 1-inch mortar joints, there’s no room for error.
“Everything has to be perfect,” McClung said. “But it’s all fun. I’d much rather be doing this kind of work than plain ol’ Plano.”
