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‘A RESPITE FROM THE CITY’
The past secures the future of this wooded refuge in the middle of Lakewood
By KERI MITCHELL
Photos by JENIFER McNEIL BAKER
You may not know about the simple yet significant house at 3201 Wendover Drive in Lakewood. Even those who know it’s there may never have seen it.
And that’s on purpose.
Built in 1939 for Alfred and Juanita Bromberg, the house was positioned to be “deliberately invisible from the street and deliberately subtle,” according to its City of Dallas landmark documents. At that time, the property was situated “at the edge of town,” its National Historic Register form states, and “the historic context of this house remains unchanged since it was constructed.”

To this day, both documents note, the property remains a “respite from the city.”





Lakewood itself is not urban. The single-family neighborhood that developed between the 1920s and the 1960s was a classic subdivision at its inception and remains suburban in its present form, but the city grew up around it. A 10-acre wooded refuge in the middle of this urban context is an endangered species, which is precisely why the current owner, Dan Patterson, and his late wife, Gail, sought to protect the property with landmark and historic designations.
And yet, the question of what the future holds for 3201 Wendover hovers over the expansive acreage. When the Pattersons moved in 14 years ago, houses on nearby Sondra and Velasco were “$150,000 teardowns,” he says. “Now they’re $1 million homes.”
“I know that Lakewood is changing. It’s changing quickly,” Patterson says. “And the uses of this land are going to depend on the circumstances of Lakewood.”
Of the 10 acres, only two are protected — the land on which the house sits.
“I can sell off the land; that’s not the issue,” Patterson says. “I can’t destroy the house.”
What he is allowed to do, however, isn’t what he wants to do. Patterson actually re-assembled the original property when he and his wife bought the house.
The Brombergs had held onto five of their original nine acres after selling off two 2-acre lots in the ’60s. Patterson purchased those lots and added them back to the estate.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the property was part of the expansive Metzer Dairies farmland. A feeding trough near Beards Branch Creek still exists along the border Patterson’s land shares with Lakewood Elementary’s outdoor learning area. The creek also trickles between the parcels purchased in the late ’30s by Bromberg and his good friend, Stanley Marcus.
“They decided to move to Lakewood, which was the new up-and-coming neighborhood,” Patterson says. “They bought 10 acres across the creek from each other.”
The gate connecting their properties, used by the two men to visit each other, still stands, he says. Of course, the property around the two houses is now filled in with lots of other single-family homes.
Stanley Marcus, one of the namesakes of the Neiman Marcus empire, originally commissioned notable architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design his house, until Wright was fired for a design that overreached Marcus’ $25,000 construction budget by $115,000. Local architect Roscoe DeWitt took over, creating “a unique and singular statement,” the landmark document states, amid the Lakewood neighborhood where “the romantic revival styles of Tudor, Italianate, and Spanish dominated.”
The 10,000-square-foot contemporary mansion at 10 Nonesuch Road is no doubt flashier and more famous than the 5,500-square-foot house on Wendover, and that was intentional on the part of the Brombergs. They hired O’Neil Ford, who specialized in Texas regional architecture, to design “an honest house that respected the natural environment,” according to the landmark documents.
The house “allow[ed] the Brombergs to take advantage of the local climate in an informal lifestyle that including outdoor living for much of the year.” The creek and woods around the house, then and now, “provides a unique sense of seclusion that is unusual in a large city.”
“Peaceful” is the word Patterson believes most apt.
He wasn’t an immediate fan, however.
“It looked like it was going to be very expensive to renovate. But I loved the land,” Patterson says. “Gail handled the house and did an amazing job. I did the land and it was a work in progress. It’s still a work in progress.”

They were living in a historic home on Swiss Avenue with young children when they first learned about the property. The Brombergs’ son, Arthur, inherited the property when Juanita Bromberg died in 1999 at the age of 96. He had reached
