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The Frank Silas Doernbecher House

A Pioneering English Arts & Crafts Home
2323 NE Tillamook Street

Most Portland residents are familiar with the world-renowned Doernbecher Children's Hospital, part of the complex of medical facilities that make up Oregon Health Sciences Center on Marquam Hill overlooking Portland's downtown.  Few are aware that it was a bequest of Frank Silas Doernbecher, the first owner of this house, that founded the hospital in the 1920's.  Upon his death in 1921, his will directed his descendents to devote one quarter of his estate for a charity to benefit the people of the community and the state, and they elected to create the children's hospital with a bequest of $200,000.

The fortune that helped pay for the startup of the hospital came from his interest in the c, at its peak one of the largest furniture manufacturers in the country.  Frank Doernbecher founded his company in Portland in 1900 after having achieved success in Tacoma in the same business starting in 1888.  His Portland factory stood on land along Sullivan's Gulch, now the route of Interstate Highway 84 through Portland's East Side, not far from the grand house he built in Irvington for himself and his family.

For three generations, the Doernbecher family lived in this home.  Then in 1976, new owners acquired it, modernized its mechanical systems, cleaned and restored its exterior and repairing and preserving its sumptuous interior.  Shortly after they began work, they successfully nominated the house for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which was granted in 1978.  The designation recognized both the importance of the home's first owner and its intact condition as a prime example of "Tudor Revival Style" architecture in Portland.  Also of interest is the beautifully worked interior with elaborate Classical Style moldings and decorative elements reported to have been produced in Doernbecher's own furniture company.

At the time of the house's listing on the National Register, there had been little research into residential architectural styles of the early 20th Century, and this house was referred to as a "Tudor Revival Style" home.  Now it is understood that interest in Tudor period styles (including many vernacular regional styles from the English countryside built during the reign of the Tudor monarchy which don't at all resemble what we in America now call "Tudor Style") gained impetus from the Arts & Crafts movement in England launched by the work and writings of William Morris, John Ruskin, and W. F. A Voysey, among others.

Their movement was a reaction to the ornamental excesses of the Victorian Age and to the degradation of labor that they observed to be the result of machine-based manufacture.  They saw an opportunity to give workers a renewed sense of dignity and pride of creation while producing both furnishings and homes which displayed tastefully simple hand-made materials and ornament.  These concepts reached the mass of Americans in the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892 in the British exhibits.  By the end of the 1890's, American architects were seeking a new aesthetic for residential design that built on the English ideals, but was purely American.  Gustav Stickley, Harvey Ellis and others of the time introduced the Craftsman Style as just this kind of new residential style.  (See the Gilliland House for more on Craftsman Style homes)

At the time this house was constructed, the English Arts & Crafts, the earliest forms of Craftsman Style, and American Colonial Revival were competing in the U.S. as the "next big thing" in residential architecture, with Colonial Revival still strongly in the lead, especially in conservative Portland.  This house is one of just 2 or three built prior to 1904 in Portland, which adopted the English Arts & Crafts idiom as well as some of the Craftsman Style concepts in its exterior.  At the time the National Register Nomination was submitted for this house, the researchers were unable to determine the architect responsible for the design.  Recently, however, a solid attribution to Joseph Jacobberger has been made based on a reference in the 1909 Portland Architectural Club Yearbook in which an exhibit by Jacobberger of "House for F. S. Doernbecher" is presented.  To see another Irvington home designed by Jacobberger, also in an English Arts & Crafts/Jacobethan style, see the Costello House listing in this website.