The 1965 Commencement House

Why there was a six-year hiatus between Commencement Houses is debatable, but one reason could be due to turmoil in the Department of Art at the Woman's College which resulted in Ivy's departure, or perhaps Gulledge could not afford to bankroll the effort, or maybe the trio of leaders on the first two houses could not find a site suitable for the endeavor. Certainly it was not for the lack of a client. Nancy Downs, the hostess for the WUNC-TV show "Potpourri" that had featured the 1958 Commencement House, expressed interest to Loewenstein suggesting that if he would ever need a client that he should think of her. In fact, her life circumstances had changed, for she had married Herbert Smith and they had started a family. Her desire to serve as the client for the Woman's College design class remained firm and, in this way, the students once again had the opportunity to work with clients in shaping a "real world" design experience, but this one with an incredibly tight time line for completion—one semester to design and build.

The students started with a client with very certain ideas about the house. Based on what she learned in her two-year stint as hostess for "Potpourri," Nancy Smith had done lots of thinking about the house of her dreams: "I love an open kitchen so I can see what's going on…I love the feeling of rooms that flow into each other….Most of the time we entertain very informally—just friends, one or two couples dropping over, but three or four times a year, on special days like Derby Day and the Bowl Games, we have twelve to eighteen people in for a buffet….Separateness is important. Herb and I really love our children, but we don't do very well all under each other's feet." These design suggestions from the clients elicited great creativity from the students of the class, with every student submitting a design for consideration by Loewenstein, designer John Taylor, interior consultant Gregory Ivy, and the clients.

The winning scheme, a clean-lined two-story proposal by Polly Colville, featured a dramatic 17-foot high window wall in the entrance hall, a second-floor deck above a terrace overlooking the golf course at the rear of the lot. Once the house design had been approved, as with the 1958 and 1959 houses, the class divided into committees and evolved detailed plans for living and sleeping areas, kitchen and laundry, site and landscaping. Some students constructed scale models of Colville's design and others worked on public relations materials for the house's grand opening. All of the women worked to provide a seamless quality between interior and exterior of the structure through materials—paneling, tile, flooring, and wall covering, many materials left in a natural state.

According the Bride's Magazine article, class members "were determined that the décor should be an integral part of the house itself, and not superimposed ‘like a mink stole over a tennis dress'," noting that their goal of quiet neutrals in the permanent interior scheme "allowed brilliant, rich colors in paintings, accessories, and upholstery." With budget in mind, the students worked diligently alongside client, contractor, design professionals at school and beyond, and with Loewenstein himself, to complete the enormous task of building a house in three months from the ground up.