Wisconsin Life

>> Brooks Stevens was a 28 year-old industrial designer when he built his home in 1939. Its stark, modern look was completely at odds with the more traditional houses in Stevens' upscale suburban neighborhood. >> He's making a statement. It's almost like Brooks Stevens personified. He was daring people of means who had already lived in the neighborhood to rethink what it was to be living in a modern age. >> Brooks Stevens approached designing his home the same way he did designing products. It was always about the future. Brooks Stevens enrolled at Cornell University in 1929 to pursue a degree in architecture. But when he found he was more interested in drawing cars than buildings, he quit school. Stevens returned to his hometown of Milwaukee during the worst economic downturn in American history. >> In the 1930s, Americans are looking to the future, because in the present, you're living in the Depression. And it's a terrible time. They're looking at what life will be when we get out of the Depression. And they see that life influenced by the modern inventions of science. >> The science of aerodynamics led to the age's futuristic-looking ships, airplanes and trains. And to get Americans buying again, manufacturers applied this look of aerodynamic design, or streamlining, to products. This was where Brooks Stevens found his niche when he started his industrial design business at the age of 24. By 1939, Stevens was a rising star in the industrial design world. And he wanted a new home that would express his visionary take on the future. >> Here's a designer, that in his everyday role for us, he's deciding, what should an iron be? What should the inside of a train car be? How does that give us a sense of where we're going as a progressive nation? What's the future look like? He has a chance to do that in his own home. >> The home that Brooks Stevens designed for himself and his family is not like its neighbors, traditional houses that look to the past for inspiration. The Stevens house is a bold statement about the future. Stevens built his house in the village of Fox Point, a fashionable Milwaukee suburb. He collaborated with architect, Fitzhugh Scott. The house they devised was very modern. Historians have since dubbed the style, Streamline Moderne. And when it was built, some neighbors derisively called Stevens' new home the only Greyhound bus station in Fox Point. >> Streamline Moderne was adopted for train stations, bus stations, and it's because it came from trains and buses that were being designed. So they were looking for continuity, a look about the future, and movement, speed, travel. So when you apply that to a house, it's almost contrary to the values of a typical house as we think of it. We want it to be rooted. >> The house comes out of the way that Brooks Stevens sees the goods that he's designing. Brooks Stevens took his house and then wrapped it in a shroud to make it slick and clean and simple and modern-looking. >> Brooks Stevens and his wife Alice were still newlyweds when they built their home. Its exterior expressed his career and ambitions. But the interior was a different story. >> Brooks Stevens was someone who made his career in embracing the future. That doesn't mean his wife necessarily played from that playbook. >> Alice didn't exactly buy into her husband's design sensibility. >> She felt that she wanted something more traditional. So she got her traditional interior, and he got his modern exterior. >> They must have been at loggerheads. I mean, I would love to have been a fly on the wall and hear those conversations. >> The interior of Brooks Stevens' home wasn't entirely unrelated to its modernist wrapping. For example, throughout the home, Stevens used aluminum. >> In the '30s, it's the new material. It's finally come down in price. So they're starting to use it for architectural details. Brooks Stevens is all over it. So from the entry door to the balustrade of the staircase, those details in the house reinforce the idea of something that's modern. >> And the only window with a view of the neighbors took its cue from streamlined ships. >> That one window that you look back toward the neighbors is a porthole window. And it's almost like a lens. You're seeing back in time to history and how old those houses look. >> Brooks Stevens has been described as a showman. His house, the home for his growing family, was also a kind of stage set for a modern man of business. When hosting clients, Stevens saw his home as the perfect backdrop to sell his vision of the future. >> Well, he's selling his personality, he's selling his business, his design acumen. But he's also selling a lifestyle. Brooks Stevens was designing modernity in the context of an English country house. It is all of the beauty of the garden and the house on the hill, but it's modern. You don't have to reject society to be modern. That progressive thinking and innovative thinking can exist within a corporate context. And that's the sales pitch. >> Stevens became a nationally prominent industrial designer. Some of his best-known work included the Miller Beer logo, the Jeep Wagoneer and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. When Stevens was asked to identify a favorite among his thousands of designs, he replied, "None. Because every one would have to be restudied for the tastes of tomorrow." He was always thinking about the future. Brooks and Alice Stevens lived in their home for more than 40 years, raising their four children. Brooks Stevens died at the age of 83. The current owners of the home bought it from the Stevens family in 1985. They have renovated the house to suit family living today. And yet it remains a wonderful landmark of the 1930s. >> The house is probably better than it's ever been, because the new owners really understand both the time period as well as what Brooks Stevens was trying to achieve in the 1930s. So there's no longer any conflict between the interiors wanting to be French Provincial and designer with Streamline Moderne on the exterior. Now the building envelope, the spaces of the rooms, the furniture within the rooms, and the objects on those pieces of furniture are all within the context of the 1930s, and it's spectacular. >> The Brooks Stevens house reminds us of an America positive about its future, and a designer who brought that future to life.