When Your House Might Be a Modernist Copycat

Mellanie Silva first fell in love with her midcentury-modern East Texas residence after coming across a listing for it on Facebook. Though the 1965 home, located in the small town of Colmesneil, was across the state from where she’d been living, she couldn’t resist its asymmetrical roofline and shag-carpeted conversation pit. To her, the house was more than worth making the three-hour drive to see in person. Though Silva hadn’t been seriously looking to buy, she decided to make an offer—and got it. Once the house was hers, she and her fiancé relocated to Colmesneil and started posting photos of the property under the name Big Pines MCM on social media.

A few months in, one of Big Pines MCM’s followers reached out to Silva and asked if she’d heard of the 20th-century Chicago architect Harry Weese. Turns out, Big Pines’s distinctive roofline—twin gables connected by a lower rooftop—and other details, like its two wings linked by a suspended walkway above a double-sided fireplace and conversation pit, took lines from the noted modernist’s own home in the Chicago suburb of Barrington.

Weese—who in the 1930s studied at MIT under Alvar Aalto alongside I. M. Pei and Eero Saarinen and was mentored by Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook, where he became close with Eero and Charles Eames—designed a series of houses in the area for his wife, interior designer Kitty Baldwin Weese, and their three daughters. But the Weese House and Studio is his most celebrated. The prolific modernist architect, who also specialized in historic preservation, built the home as a winter studio and summer getaway for his family in the late ’50s, shortly after his career took off. It received national exposure in an October 1958 issue of Life and was also featured in Architectural Record’s "Houses of 1960" study.

Intrigued, Silva reached out to the person who sold her the East Texas residence—the daughter of the original homeowner, Helen Robertson—to inquire about its pedigree. Robertson’s daughter told Silva that, according to the family’s story, her mother saw Weese’s house in the 1958 Life spread and decided to copy it, bringing the magazine to Port Arthur, Texas, firm Braun & Bernhardt to show the architects what she wanted. The specifics, though, are murky, as there’s no record of Robertson’s correspondence with the architects, and all of them have since passed away. Silva collected the original blueprints from Robertson’s family and tried to do an internet deep-dive on her home’s history, but she couldn’t track down any official documentation linking the Weese House and Studio to its East Texas lookalike. Still, the architect’s Barrington home "is the only example of our roofline that I’ve been able to find," Silva says. "Also, the interior floor plan is so similar."

Architecture historian and critic Robert Bruegmann thinks it’s possible that Silva’s house is a close copy of Weese’s home. "By the 1950s, Weese was appearing in national magazines—so it could have happened," says the University of Illinois at Chicago professor, who has studied Weese’s work for decades and authored the 2010 book The Architecture of Harry Weese. "Weese would design something, and his attitude was, Let’s build it and see if it stands," adds Bruegmann. "It was more of an experimental type of thing than a set of rules to follow." 

The architect did borrow from the vernacular dogtrot houses of the American South a lot in his designs, Bruegmann says, as his wife was from Alabama, and the pair spent plenty of time there. Silva’s house, then, with its breezeway-like layout, could have just been a 1970s iteration of the dogtrot. "Weese doesn’t get that much attention as other famous architects because he didn’t stick to a signature or iconic style that could easily be attributed to him," adds Chicago interior designer Leah Bolger.

Pulling from a common architectural ancestry is one thing, but direct copycat projects are rare (probably in large part because of the murky legalities around copyright, which is also the case with knockoff furniture, though instances of that are much more widespread). Cases of everyday people recreating homes by noted architects (or modeled after landmarks) are not nonexistent, however. As Dwell reported in May 2024, one Philadelphia man, for example, is trying to build an East Coast lookalike of Craig Ellwood’s recently demolished Zimmerman House based on archival photographs of the Los Angeles midcentury, with help from nonprofit educational archive U.S. Modernist and an L.A. firm that specializes in Ellwood restoration projects.

But copycat homes don’t only happen to the designs of famous 20th-century architects. Hafsa Burt, principal of California firm hb+a Architects, says she’s seen her designs copied and pasted from different sources. She says her blueprints and floor plans have been posted on social media by people sharing her work just because they like it without any intention of recreating the designs, but that there are websites and "public portals"—which she refrains from naming—that share architect’s floor plans without permission so others can deliberately plagiarize them. "Some individuals attempt to bypass architects to avoid their fees, often seeking to obtain concepts and or schematics for free, and then hire drafters or designers," Burt says.

It’s worth noting that Silva’s Texas home isn’t an exact "dupe" of the Weese House and Studio. The former has a carport—it would have had two, but Robertson changed her mind once the architects started construction—beneath one of the gables that slants down to almost touch the ground. Weese’s roof is shingled; the Texas one uses metal. The interiors aren’t an exact one-to-one either: even similar elements, like the fireplace and catwalk, are made from different materials.

Regardless, for Silva, the likeness to Weese’s Barrington residence only adds to the charm of Big Pines MCM. Since she bought the house, she’s heard from people across social media saying they too had wanted to buy it, but she says almost all of them confessed that they would have remodeled it right away. Silva hates the idea of changing the original design. "The house can be very polarizing for people," she says. "Some guests really love it, or they hate it."

Top photo of Big Pines MCM courtesy Mellanie Silva

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