House

There has been more than one Williams House at 4848 Lyons View Pike. The  house we see today was preceded by an entirely different structure built by Eugenia’s father, Dr. David Williams Jr.  In the early 1910s Dr. Williams purchased 24 acres of land on Lyons View Pike from Robert L. Anderson. By 1916 he constructed a two-story family home on the property. While Dr. Williams’s exact motivations for moving his family from downtown Knoxville to Bearden are not known, he was likely influenced by lifestyle trends among upper-class Americans. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, many wealthy families moved out of urban centers in favor of rural areas where they could purchase large tracts of land. This pattern became known as the American Country House movement.

Upper-class Americans built country homes for a variety of reasons. Some, like Europeans of the 1700s and 1800s, wished to display their wealth and status by building grand estates. However, many proponents of the American Country House movement cited the benefits of reconnecting with nature and the need to escape what they perceived as the detrimental effects of city living. This may have been Dr. Williams’s motivation, as he had recently lost his wife and younger daughter to illness, and his seven-year-old son David Williams III was in poor health. Sadly, Eugenia’s younger brother David died a month before the house was completed. The remaining members of the Williams family, teenage Eugenia and her father, moved into the house in 1916.

Eugenia graduated from the Grier School in Pennsylvania in 1917 and lived in the original Lyons View house with her father until 1920 when she married Richard Gordon Chandler. In 1929 Dr. Williams passed away, leaving the house and surrounding estate to Eugenia, his only surviving heir. After divorcing Chandler in 1936, Eugenia began a new chapter in her life as an independent woman of means.

John Fanz Staub (1892 – 1981)

After inheriting the house and grounds from her father, Eugenia set about transforming the property from her father’s country estate to her own private oasis. In addition to significant changes to the surrounding landscape, Eugenia razed the original building and hired well-known architect and Knoxville native John F. Staub to design her new house. By this time Staub had already made a name for himself on the national stage by designing country houses in Houston and other regions of the American South.

Having grown up in a prominent Knoxville family and studied under distinguished architects like Harrie T. Lindeberg, Staub was well-suited to the preferences of his well-to-do clientele. In addition, Staub’s mastery of a wide array of architectural styles allowed him to create one-of-a-kind homes that suited his clients’ individual tastes. One of the most well-known of Staub’s early projects was Bayou Bend, a grand estate designed for Houston philanthropist Ima Hogg that combined both English Georgian (circa 1714 to 1830) and Spanish Creole (circa 1750 to 1850) architectural features. This seamless blending of different historical styles and regional influences was Staub’s trademark and featured prominently in the home he designed for Eugenia. The house he created was generally regarded as being well-suited to Eugenia’s personality. Her friend Marge Cordova once stated, “from the driveway, [the house] reflected very much the Eugenia I knew.”

Image Credit: Bayou Bend, 1926 by John F. Staub (The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, Howard Barnstone)

Staub designed the house for Eugenia mainly in the Regency Revival style.  The Regency Era took its name from the period in the early 1800s when the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) served as Regent for his father, King George III.  Regency style is the late phase of Georgian architecture. It features refined classical proportions, restrained ornamentation, and a blend of neoclassical formality with light, graceful detailing. Regency architects utilized the new materials of the Industrial Revolution, such as cast iron, and adapted homes to their surrounding landscape in accordance with the Picturesque landscape movement. In contrast to the rigidly organized gardens popular in the mid-1700s, Picturesque landscapes, while still intentionally designed, appeared more natural and organic. As a result, architects of the Regency period—and modern architects like Staub, who emulated the Regency style—designed homes to blend into the natural environment rather than stand out from it.

Staub abandoned symmetrical windows in favor of windows placed to enhance views and maximize sunlight and air circulation. Balconies, verandas, and bay windows were added to create indoor-outdoor transitional spaces. Given that Eugenia’s alterations to the estate included sloping topography and wooded, intimate gardens similar to Picturesque designs, Staub’s use of Regency-style architecture for the house was a logical choice. Although it is unknown whether Eugenia’s landscape changes influenced Staub’s design choices (or vice versa), the house Staub built exemplifies the Regency ideal of emphasizing the surrounding landscape.

The city approved the permit for the new house in 1940, and builders completed construction in 1941. The finished home was an excellent example of Regency Revival architecture and reflected Staub’s design style. Staub’s signatures included the use of historical floor layouts, façades, and decorative elements evoking different architectural periods to create unconventional designs. The house’s facade, viewed from the driveway, features a central block design with a pedimented entryway and adjoining east and west wings, a staple of classical design harkening back to ancient Greece and Rome. However, Staub deviated from the classical tradition by implementing different heights for the roof lines on either side of the central block, using a combination of rectangular and octagonal windows, and designing the east and west wings to have different story layouts. Although Staub used similar features in his previous residential designs, the house he built for Eugenia was unusual in the degree to which Staub used nonuniform features to create a facade that still feels symmetrical. The house’s southern facade features a two-story verandah overlooking the woodlands, wild gardens, and the Tennessee River. Verandahs were a fixture of Staub’s residential designs, and he incorporated more Regency elements within the cast-iron columns and decorative railings.