UNIQUE PENTHOUSE BUILT ATOP HISTORIC HOTEL
UNIQUE PENTHOUSE BUILT ATOP HISTORIC HOTELEditor Posted on Tuesday, August 28, 2001
EUREKA SPRINGS, ARKANSAS – Marty and Elise Roenigk had no plans to crown the Crescent Hotel with a penthouse when they bought the building four years ago, but the architecture of the historic hotel – and the couple’s need for living space – made the project a natural.
Frank Lloyd Wright would have approved, and that’s appropriate, since the Roenigks and their designer, Richard Pollard, drew heavily from Wright’s Prairie School style of architecture in creating the 3,000-square-foot home.
“We’ve always liked Frank Lloyd Wright,” Marty Roenigk says. “We just decided we wanted to sort of apply things a little Prairie Style-like. We didn’t want such a cluttered feeling as you have with Victorian style.”
The Prairie School celebrated an appreciation of nature, and advocates, of which Wright is the best known, believed buildings should blend into their environments.
That’s just what the Roenigks have done with their penthouse apartment.
The 68-room Crescent, built in 1886, was damaged by fire in the 1960s and a portion of the building was destroyed. The Roenigks originally intended to replace the lost space, and that’s where their penthouse apartment now rests, nestled between two guest penthouses.
While the private penthouse actually extends over three floors – the entryway is on the fourth floor and there’s a tower room on the sixth – the main living area is on one floor, which is what the couple wanted.
“We like living on one floor,” Elise Roenigk says.
“We went from a three-story Victorian house to a one-story apartment,” Marty Roenigk adds.
Adding a fifth floor to the hotel required structural reinforcements, and more than 50 steel beams were installed – another Wright-esque touch since steel beams had allowed the architect more versatility in his designs.
Once the beams were in place, construction began in earnest on the fifth floor, and the result is a beautiful, yet comfortable, home. Comfort was clearly one goal the Roenigks hoped to achieve.
“We collect antique music boxes, but we’re not planning on making this a museum,” Elise Roenigk says, explaining that the home was meant to be lived in and enjoyed.
Even the comfort of the couple’s registered Irish setter, All That Jazz, was considered in designing the apartment. Large ceramic tiles cover the kitchen floor as well as that of a bathroom-laundry combination room. The tiles blend beautifully with the earth tones used in decorating the suite, but the material was selected to give Jazz cool surfaces on which to relax.
Oak wood is featured prominently throughout the apartment – in this case, it’s scarce white, quarter-sawn oak used for the neat straight lines of trim that Wright favored. The interior doors are all solid oak, each trimmed with a hand-crafted ceramic tile from an antique collection Pollard had purchased and intended to use in his own home. It is unusual, he says, to find such a large collection of matching tiles from that era.
Wallpaper designs that highlight several of the rooms, including the master bedroom and the Roenigks’ his-and-hers offices, are from the world-famous Bradbury & Bradbury, makers of hand-made historic designed wallpapers. Gold flecks in the paper not visible in the daylight sparkle at night, Pollard says.
The horizontal lines popular in the Prairie School are continued here in the design of a sandstone fireplace in the expansive living room. Topped by glass, the fireplace is a functional focal point, providing heat when needed but allowing light in from a nearby window. The fireplace acts, in effect, as a curtain for the main room, and creates a small nook on the window side, Elise Roenigk notes. The view, she adds, is “phenomenal.”
Several rooms in the penthouse have similar nooks, although each is unique in function and design. The oak-shelved library, for example, has a reading nook, complete with small benches and a window view that overlooks the hotel gardens. It is, Pollard says, “a cozy corner, a snuggery, away from everything.”
Special Faurile glass, a multi-colored, luminescent glass done in the style of Tiffany, adds a touch of elegance to the bookshelves in the skylight-topped library.
Expanding a building with a sloping mansard-style roof presented some challenges, but the Roenigks used the resulting odd-shaped corners and niches to create storage places. The result is few conventional closets but an abundance of cubbyholes of various sizes and shapes.
Skylights augment the natural lighting throughout the penthouse suite, including the library and the dining room. Electric light fixtures, including the dining room chandelier, are all replicas from either the Prairie Style school with its neat straight lines or the Arts and Crafts Movement period.
Pollard explains that the Arts and Crafts Movement, popular from about 1895 to 1915, developed in resistance to increasing industrialization and resulting disappearance of fine handwork previously done by craftsmen.
In that vein, Pollard and the Roenigks sought out local craftsmen and artisans whenever possible and incorporated their work into the penthouse. That’s how they came to have copper Craftsman-style lanterns in the home. “They’re new but they’re done in the style of the Arts and Crafts period,” Pollard explains.
The “tower room,” a sixth-floor observation room, is a prime example of combining function with art. The room, accessible by a winding staircase, gives visitors a 360-degree view of the surroundings.
From that point is arguably the best view of Eureka Springs available to anyone without wings.
“Birds fly below us,” Elise Roenigk says of the couple’s scenic vistas from the fifth and sixth floors. “We see eagles here.”
The room is also functional, supporting the hotel’s lightning protection system. In the tower roof is a steel sculpture, also designed and built by a local artist, that provides support for the massive system. The artist designed, built and assembled the structure.
Still to come also is an extension of the elevator to the penthouse. At present, the penthouse is entered from a nondescript door on the fourth floor. Tucked into a corner next to the elevator, the door looks exactly like the doors to the hotel guest rooms. The Roenigks can see who’s ringing their bell, however, through a closed-circuit television. Visitors allowed in must then climb a winding staircase to the fifth floor.
The Roenigks moved to Eureka Springs from Connecticut. Their designer, Pollard, is also a transplanted East Coast native who has now retired in Eureka Springs.
The couple credit Pollard with the design of their new home.
“Marty and Elise are lovers of Wright’s design,” Pollard says. “They wanted a Frank Lloyd Wright-looking environment.”
“Richard just took it from there and got carried away,” Elise Roenigk says of the penthouse design.
All seem pleased with the design.
“This is my crowning job,” he says of the Roenigks’ new penthouse.