A year after news broke that auto mogul Clay Cooley and his wife, Lisa, quietly assembled three architecturally significant Park Cities properties, demolition has begun on the most distinctive of them all — Highland Park’s so-called Mushroom House. We all knew demolition was imminent, just not how imminent.
I realized this week it had been a year since I broke the story of the Cooleys’ purchase: two homes on Armstrong Parkway and a third on Bordeaux, which backs up to one of their Armstrong purchases. We knew the Mushroom House’s days were numbered, so I drove over to see what was going on.
The house was still standing, but the bulldozers were out and digging up the backyard. And while contractors I spoke to couldn’t confirm a timeline, or wouldn’t, it was clear the clock was running out.
By about 3 p.m. Wednesday, we had confirmation that the legendary Mushroom House was being razed. By the end of the day, it was a memory.
The Mushroom House was architect Tom Workman’s dream. When finished in the late 1990s, neighbors loudly disapproved and predicted their property values would drop because of the so-called monstrosity. Workman, a gentle and quiet man, was unfazed. He finally had his fairytale Gnome House and lived happily here with his wife for decades.
The two endangered historic homes are a Tudor at 4209 Bordeaux by Thomson & Swain, designed by James R. Bower (who was also in the auto business), and a 1926 Tudor at 4208 Armstrong Parkway designed by Anton Korn for Harry S. Moss…