Review: Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America

In architectural history, scholars too rarely attribute works of architecture to collaborations between architects and their clients. They are more likely to explain a work in terms of the architect’s design proclivity or, at times, the skill of the client. Fortunately, Volker M. Welter takes a very different approach in Tremaine Houses, which focuses on key works of modern art and architecture while emphasizing the architectural patronage of the Tremaine family. The brothers Burton and Warren Tremaine and their wives, Emily Hall and Katherine Williams, hailed from a history of affluence. The Tremaine family holdings included the Miller Company, a light-fixture business in Meriden, Connecticut, and ranch lands near Mesa, Arizona. The trove of archival materials associated with the family and its architects, including those housed in the Art, Design & Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara (where Welter is a professor of history of art...