page_title: Hugh T. Keyes
section_title: Other notable works
hierarchical_section_title: Hugh T. Keyes / Other notable works
caption_attribution_description: English: Residence of Max M. Gilman, President of Packard Motor Car Company (designed by Hugh T. Keyes, 1937)
context_page_description: Hugh Tallman Keyes was a noted early to mid 20th-century American architect.
  He designed grand estates for "the great and the wealthy of the Detroit area", and "his work appeared in national magazines for decades." He is considered "one of the most prolific and versatile architects of the period," and significant in the Art Deco and mid-century modern architectural movement in Detroit.
context_section_description: Schlafer House
  Fairway Hills Dr., Franklin (1961)
  Client: Maurice A. Schlafer
  Style: Regency, Ranch
  In 1961, when Keyes was 73, five years after he designed Fisher House on Fairway Hills Dr. in Franklin, Maurice A. Schlafer (of the Schlafer Iron and Metal family) hired him to design a miniature version right across the street. The single story ranch-style house wraps around the back of the property in a U-shape, leaving a deceptively diminutive façade that belies its five-thousand square feet (which still makes it one of the smallest of Keyes's houses). It has Fisher House's Regency white brick and Tuscan colonnade and entablature with spiral volutes. Contrasting French shutters frame the walls of windows. Keyes retained his characteristic clean lines, open floor plan, and dramatic light-filled rooms—provided by the maximized window surface area from the back courtyard. Schlafer House would be the last project of Keyes's career.
  Whitby Hall
   Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (1955)
  Style: Colonial Georgian
  Keyes was chosen by the Detroit Institute of Arts to design the elaborate interior rooms of Whitby Hall, the centerpiece of its American Decorative Arts Gallery. The interiors "were completely redecorated with a new background formed by panelling from Early American Colonial houses. The alterations made to Whitby Hall were quite comprehensive." New ceilings, fireplaces (including a design with elaborate Doric frieze carving in the parlor), windows, air supply equipment, wiring and lighting "presented a number of problems which were successfully solved." Whitby Hall was an 18th-century Pennsylvania country house, the farm acquired in 1741 and the house enlarged in 1754 by James Coultas (merchant, shipowner, and high sheriff of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1758). The original house featured a steep pedimented gable with cove cornices, and a three-story, pedimented stone entrance and stair tower. Much of the architectural ornament of Whitby Hall is originally attributed to Samuel Harding (who designed the interior of Independence Hall in 1753, the inspiration for Whitby's stair tower). The interiors were removed from Whitby Hall in the 1920s and installed at the DIA (where, "ironically, the façade is of white clapboard, a far cry from Whitby's actual stately gray stone").
  Emory Ford House
  Woodland Pl., Grosse Pointe (1949)
  Client: Emory M. Ford
  Style: Regency
  Another renovation and addition by Keyes, the Emory Ford House was originally built in 1928 by Robert O. Derrick. When Emory M. Ford (the great grandson of John Baptiste Ford and part of the "Chemical Ford" family) acquired the estate in 1940, Ford hired Keyes to make significant changes. Keyes added "artistic glass and mirror installations, including a stair banister with glass balusters," as well as an attached conservatory overlooking Lake St. Clair and a mansard roof with parapet. The house sits just down the road from Keyes's much earlier mansard house Pingree House.
  Tyrol Ski Lodge
  Hidden Valley Resort, Gaylord (1947)
  Client: Donald B. McLouth
  Style: Swiss Chalet
  The Hidden Valley Resort was formed in 1937 by Detroit-area steel magnate Donald B. McLouth (founder and president of McLouth Steel) and was the first private ski club in North America (and had the first motorized rope tow in the U.S.). Members included Detroit industrialists such as the families of Henry Ford, William Durant, Walter Briggs, C. Thorne Murphy, Alvan Macauley, David Wallace, Gordon Saunders, and Lang Hubbard. In 1947, 6 years after McLouth hired Keyes to design his home in Bloomfield Hills, Keyes was hired to design an extensive expansion of the resort with a Tyrolian Alpine motif (aided by Austrians in charge of construction and desired by club founders who frequented the slopes of Austria and Switzerland). At the centerpiece of Keyes's design was a "Hansel-and-Gretel-look" Swiss chalet style lodge, where he incorporated bow-fronted, symmetrical wings and specifically referenced the traditional building style of houses and farms in the Alpine regions of Switzerland, Savoy and Tyrol. (Keye
caption: Lake Park House
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