Restoring Richard Meier’s Douglas House

An account of the restoration and preservation work since 2007

Richard Meier, working in studio, and Tod Williams, working on site, designed and built the Douglas House in 1973 for James and Jean Douglas. The lot’s slope is so steep that you enter at the roof. A forty- three-foot bridge leaves the road and lands at the top of a white box that then drops four stories through the trees toward Lake Michigan. The private face is vertical tongue-and-groove redwood, painted white, with square punched windows and two blue doors. The public face is glass, a short brick base carrying three steel stacks, and a hairpin of painted steel stairs that flies out over the evergreens. Almost every signature of Meier’s later work is already here: the white, the shaped light, the ship rails and stacks, the insistence that inside and outside occupy the same view.

We bought the house in 2007. The signatures were already in trouble. The bridge sagged and had pulled its pipe rail sideways; walking across it from the parking area to the upper door no longer felt safe. Window seals had failed. Thermopane units installed in the 1980s had fogged and exposed aluminum edges into sightlines Meier had drawn as a single white line. Water was in the masonry at the stacks. The flying stairs were rusted, flaking, and unstable underfoot. Curved glass was cracking. The wood frame, more than thirty years old and sitting on driven pilings in a moving dune, was doing what wood does on a Great Lakes bluff.

We consulted Richard Meier and worked from our copies of his specification book and original drawings. His rule, which we used on every job that followed, was plain: a stronger structure inside was allowed; the visible exterior had to remain as close as possible to the original materials and appearance. That was also how the house would remain itself long enough to be recognized. At forty-five it was already on a path toward the National Register of Historic Places. It was listed in 2016. A code-driven change to the railings, or thickened mullions, would have saved the building by erasing it.

The bridge was the first thing a visitor felt. The drawings showed structural wood beams beneath, a pipe rail on the south, and a solid guard on the north. We meant to disconnect both ends, take the span to a warehouse, and rebuild an exact copy with a steel backbone under the original skin. When we released the house-end connections, the wood failed and the bridge came down in pieces. The only thing that did not fall was the pipe rail. Left hanging where it had always been, it relaxed from its sag-stressed bend back to the curve Meier had drawn.

That accident became a legal restoration opportunity. Building rules would not have allowed us to replace the bridge as originally designed; a new span would have required a current-code handrail in place of Meier’s pipe rail. A code handrail would have destroyed the elevation. Because the original rail was retained in its original location, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office helped establish that we could rebuild the bridge and reattach the signature pipe railing, which remained suspended in place. We never moved it. The wood had not been the only failure. The concrete foundation at the land end had begun to creep downhill toward the house forty feet below. We replaced that footing with reinforced concrete tied to a dead-man anchor buried ten feet down beside the road, tension rods running to the center of the new foundation, and a sliding joint between the steel-stiffened bridge and the footing so that wind on the house and the differential movement of steel and wood would not rack the structure. The attachment is better than it was in 1973. From the road, nothing looks different.

The Meier-signature curtain wall facing the lake has twenty-seven panes. Most of the original single- pane glass had been swapped in the 1980s for thicker Thermopane. Wind and sag in the redwood frames broke the seals; the glass fogged; aluminum edges of the sandwich panels showed. We removed twenty-five of those panels and left the two that had never been replaced. We rebuilt the frames to the specification book in redwood so they could be tuned back to square, and we rebuilt the interior jambs that had been thickened to compensate for the Thermopane. No crane on the road could reach over the house and down the lakeside face, so we built a temporary track of stairs and walkways and opened the south façade. A crew of six walked the panes, on suction cups, down five stories through the trees to the dining deck. From there a counterweight davit — carried up in pieces and assembled on the roof deck — lifted each pane into the three stories of restored frames. Foam seals went in. Picture-frame stops went back. The sightlines through pure white frames toward the trees and the lake returned.

The stacks are a different section than at the Smith House, Douglas’s older sibling, where brick wraps the flues from grade to above the roof. Here the slope cuts the brick off just above the fireplaces and leaves silver steel for two full stories and a finish above the roof. The brick sits on a pad that bears on three of the house’s pilings. Moisture in the brick and cap ran into the fireplaces. Freeze-thaw broke the masonry and repeatedly flaked a white paint that would not let the brick breathe. Lake wind moved the steel and opened more cracks in the masonry. By the early 2000s it looked as if the stacks could fail if they were not stabilized. We took off ten courses of brick and found that the steel did not continue down to the fireboxes. The stacks were held just below the top of the masonry by three pieces of angle iron bolted into block and concrete. That was the whole connection. We placed reinforced concrete inside the brick column, welded bracing, replaced the cap with new material, improved the drainage slope, and added drains at the base of the brick column. Years later a storm — lightning, perhaps — split the top four feet of one stack; water between steel and ceramic liner then expanded the split. We scaffolded from the dining deck and built a temporary room around the stack tops so welding would not threaten the wood house. The failed steel and liner were cut off. We found a ceramic replacement from the original supplier, fabricated a new steel cylinder, and welded inside the temporary enclosure so that wind would not blow away the inert gas and ruin the weld. We refinished the stacks and the fly-ash baskets and set rain hats inside the spark arrestors so unused flues would not channel water.

Meier put the interior stair in the northeast corner and the exterior stair in the southwest: painted steel from the office level down three flights to the dining deck, the run from living to dining a hairpin that leaves the footprint of the house and hangs over the slope. It is the picture spot. After forty-five years it was rusted and sagging, and it felt as if it might not hold. We pulled the decking. The drawings showed the heavy stair carried on wood cantilevers that were no longer enough. Following Richard’s advice, we had local engineers design steel C-beams to replace the original wood beams and extended the new steel back into the supporting wall, past the usual one-third / two-thirds rule. As with the bridge, the steel is wrapped. We scaffolded three stories from the slope, tented and blasted to bare metal, rewelded key tread-to-stringer joints, and refinished with a multi-stage epoxy industrial coating in Meier White.

Just past the upper blue door, six custom curved lights open the house southwest across the entry deck toward the lake. Photocell-controlled floodlights mounted outside the curved windows project light onto the tallest interior wall and wash down through the living and dining levels. After decades of heat, freeze, wind, rain, and hail, the windows spalled at the edges and the bent glass began to propagate cracks. The roof and parapet above had leaked and ruined the painted redwood siding above the windows. We installed a new roof membrane and rebuilt the parapet, then removed the six damaged panes, had patterns made and new glass bent to the original profile, reworked the frames, and installed the new glass.

The Douglas House has a curved light from the living-room entry door — echoing the Smith House entry — rising two stories to the Douglas House entry door. From inside it looks up the hillside and follows the forty-three-foot bridge overhead. From outside it stacks with the upper door; through the glass one reads the fireplace, the stacks, and a sliver of curtain wall. It is the place where the steep site of the Douglas House declares itself against the flat waterfront of the Smith House. That pane, broken by a contractor’s mistake, is uniquely shaped, tempered, and laminated, and it sits in a frame wrapped by siding between two bridges. Pattern-making, overseas bending and tempering, a crane that closed the road to a scaffolded platform, then a hand-off through a narrow opening into a “tuned-up” steel frame — the work took more than a year. In the contractor’s language: “ten weeks for the glass, scaffolding for seven or eight days, a lifting frame hung from the crane, block-and-tackle on a trolley mount from the bridge I-beam, as six people guided the twelve-hundred-pound glass unit carefully into the original embedded steel frame.” The contract warned that nothing about the site guaranteed the new glass would survive the handling. It did.

Beyond the signature elements, we restored doors and locksets; we replaced and painted redwood siding on all exterior walls and on the shower and storage rooms; and refinished the below-house equipment rooms and crawl spaces. We replaced air conditioners with heat pumps and the converted oil furnaces with high-efficiency pulse furnaces, and added under-deck circulation to manage heat gain around the HVAC equipment. We opened the bathrooms to the studs, replaced drywall with Durock, and restarted the original tile-manufacturing operation to produce original-specification unglazed tile for the three bathrooms. We refinished the oak floors and interior stairs and painted walls, ceilings, millwork, and signature window frames in Meier White. On the north curtain wall, against a forty-five- degree cliff, we replaced thirteen Thermopane units with original-specification glass, building a forty- foot temporary deck to level and support scaffolding, and used a bespoke davit on the roof deck to raise the glass into position. Steel awning windows were removed, sandblasted, powder-coated, then glazed with low-E glass, seals, and hardware. We replaced the grinder pumps in the equipment room, ran new piping with check valves; and located, pumped, and provided access for the remote septic system. We installed industrial-scale service stairs for safe access during ongoing preservation work. We restored and maintained the original interior millwork, cabinetry, and built-ins; the Richard Meier-designed tables and sofa; and the Mies van der Rohe, Aalto, and Le Corbusier chairs. We retained the Meier- specified kitchen equipment and completed the collection of Richard Meier for Swid Powell dinnerware and serveware, together with silver trays and candlesticks.

Fifteen years of stewardship... no sag, no weather inside the walls, thermal gain and loss under control. The glass and the views are again the glass and the views Meier drew. None of that is what a visitor is supposed to notice. The pipe rail is still the pipe rail. The curtain wall still reads as one white frame. The stacks still rise in silver from a short brick base. The flying stairway still floats above the trees. The internal structure is as designed, strengthened with new materials where no one sees. The house that can be seen is as it was created. Richard agrees, Tod says like new.

From restoration notes and tour talks, 2007–present, and from general and specialist-contractors’ critical-path schedules and field plans.

Posted September 22, 2026