first learned about The Weaving Residence when a friend showed me where she and friends were thinking of staying during their Hurricane Irma evacuation route. I recognized the architect’s name and realized the owner was the author of Sarasota Modern, a book that highlights architectural gems from the Sarasota School and Florida’s regional postwar modernism. I knew the architect, Mark Hampton, because I knew of the Jordan Residence which is on Crooked Lake just a few doors down from my family place there. Growing up visiting Crooked Lake, I knew the Jordan House well. My first memory is riding by it slowly from the water on family cruises in which we would always have a running commentary about each house we passed making sure any
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criticisms were spoken low enough so the wind wouldn’t carry our words ashore. We always sort of took an extra second to look at that one. The old man who lived there would skull around the lake in the still of the morning or evening. I seem to remember him having a grape arbor (perhaps they were muscadines or just his rowboat rack), but I could just be inflating the idea that I had, that whomever lived there was cultured. His name was Stanley Jordan, but everyone called him Stan. In speaking recently with Emil Jahna, the current owner who befriended Stan and fell in love with the house before his passing, I learned that Hampton came to see the Jordan House as a work of art; and, perhaps, his masterpiece as well, as he did not much like the idea of Jahna adding on to it even under the direction of Hampton himself. “Stan and Mark were pretty
good friends. Stan had the money at the time to allow Mark to sort of freewheel and do whatever he wanted,” as Jahna explains the way the house came to be so unique. When I saw another house by the same architect in the same area code was available to rent, I immediately contacted the owner, Andrew Weaving. I had already been in contact with Weaving by doing research on Gene Leedy’s
Craney Spec Homes. “When Johnny mentioned the Weaving Residence was available to rent for the weekend, I was immediately interested in having the experience of staying in this mid-century time capsule,” says Lina Hargrett, co-founder for Florida Modernism + Design. “The Weaving Residence is not only a historic home designed and built by Hampton in 1957, but also its contents have been
One of the most charming features of this living room is the television compartment which tastefully disappears behind a wooden pannel, leaving a neat fireplace and the art above to be appeciated.
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