A Historian’s Dream House
National Park worker bees Robert Utley and Melody Webb have the perfect abode for you.
By: Candy Moulton 11/03/2009
The defining features in the 4,440-square-foot Georgetown, Texas, home of historians Robert Utley and Melody Webb are the bookshelves.
Their custom house constructed in 2000 and finished by Joe Reynolds, who had built an earlier home for the couple, needed to serve the two historians, all on one level.
“The place we wanted could be fitted onto the 1.5 acre lot, barely,” Utley says. The property has an unobstructed ground-floor view of Lake Georgetown and adjoining Corps of Engineers parkland, essentially wilderness.
That feeling of space and wilderness certainly appealed to the couple. Utley had a distinguished career as chief historian for the National Park Service (NPS), while Webb had also served with NPS in various capacities, including as superintendent of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in central Texas and as assistant superintendent of Grand Teton National Park in northwestern Wyoming.
Her earlier service at LBJ park drew them back to the Texas Hill Country following Webb’s retirement in 1996. They lived in a smaller house for a few years but found it “not very satisfactory” nor adequate to serve the needs of two working historians as both, though no longer involved with the NPS, were continuing their careers as writers.
Now they share a huge office with an adjoining reading room and bath. Their desks, which are connected by a credenza, face each other from a distance of about six feet apart. On one wall are built-in file drawers and a large metal map case; on others are bookshelves and enclosed storage.
For the couple’s extensive collection of books, the book space in the study was not enough, so they created a separate room for a library. “I can’t tell you how many feet of book shelf we have, but it did at one time hold 5,000 books,” Utley says. “Virtually all, in the study, the library and the ‘Great Room,’ had books on them, plus [more books were] on some shelves in the enclosed spaces below the exposed shelves. Oh yes, we had two free-standing bookshelves in the master bedroom and three in a guest bedroom.”
While they may have needed walls for bookshelves, the couple also likes open living space, so no walls separate the kitchen, the dining room and the living room; that portion of the house is their “Great Room.”
Placed before a mirror embedded into the bookshelves in the Great Room are some of Robert’s awards: three bronze Wranglers from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, plus the bronze bison Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from Western Writers of America.
Oversized oak cabinets in the kitchen are set off by Santa Cecilia granite countertops with speckles of gold and by oak laminate flooring with oriental carpets to provide accent.
Their large master bedroom features an adjoining bathroom with a walk-in shower and Jacuzzi, double his-and-her vanities and a dressing room. As a split bedroom design, the other two bedrooms are on the opposite side of the house. One serves as a guest bedroom, while the other is a workout room, complete with treadmill, rowing machine, hoist and free weights.
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