 Villa Finale in the Historic King William District. Photo by Jon King Keisling, courtesy of Villa Finale.What once was a dilapidated rooming house in King William is now the only place in Texas that's part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. There are only 29 such sites across the country. Among them: James Madison's home Montpelier and Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Chicago. Here in San Antonio it's the home of visionary preservationist Walter Mathis. As part of Texas Public Radio's special series on historic conservation, Michelle Koidin Jaffee reports.
September 30, 2011 · He would call it “Villa Finale.” His final home.
Walter Mathis was forced to find a new home in the 1960s. His family’s old homestead on Mulberry Avenue was in the path of construction for Highway 281.
So in 1967, the stockbroker found a limestone Italianate mansion at 401 King William Street. When it was built in 1876, it was a grand property, but over time it turned into a run-down boarding house.
It was typical of the historic homes of the King William neighborhood. They were built by frontier bankers and cattle barons as monuments of their fortunes. But a century later, they needed a great deal of repair. The south-of-downtown neighborhood was occupied by local artists and architects who didn’t have a lot of money to spend on historic renovations and were doing much repair work themselves.
Architect Lewis Fisher says Mathis came in at a point when the neighborhood was beginning to need drastic restoration.
“So he took on this large, probably the largest, most visible house in the neighborhood and restored it to his taste, into his way of thinking of what the restoration should be,” Fisher says. “He was an early preservationist in terms of restoring living neighborhoods, and so there weren’t a lot of guidelines and recommendations and Secretary of Interior standards. He was doing what he thought was the proper restoration. He did a remarkable job in that regard.”
Mathis was his own contractor on his new house, which, with its limestone arches and enormous porch, resembled an Italian villa. For more than two years a crew of 16 labored on the wiring, woodwork and plumbing. And he was right there beside them, teaching and guiding the workmen on design and technique.
But Mathis wasn’t satisfied with the saving of one home in King William. He bought 14 other properties in the neighborhood, carrying some all the way through extensive repairs to completion and selling others with no-interest or low-interest loans.
Mathis is known for spurring the revival of the King William Historic District — leaving its legacy intact but returning the area to its original beauty and inspiring others to renovate their houses.
San Antonio historian Maria Watson Pfeiffer knew Mathis since her childhood and witnessed his contributions to King William.
“He certainly brought a great deal more attention and certainly deeper pockets than most people had at that time down here,” Pfeiffer says.
From a very early age, Mathis appreciated fine things. A descendant of the first Spanish Canary Islanders who arrived in San Antonio in 1731, he had a passion for collecting and a particular fascination with Napoleon. At age 11, he bought his first piece of Napoleonic memorabilia — a collection that would grow to more than 800 objects.
Mathis began to fill his new home with his vast collections of fine art, antique musical instruments and, by the dozens, everything from shaving mugs to stick pins. Remembered by Pfeiffer for a wicked sense of humor and glint in his eye, Mathis had a goal in life to make everything beautiful.
His niece, Jessie Mathis Kardys, says he made people feel like they had a stake in the house, whether they worked on it or contributed a piece of furniture or a chandelier — or just walked in the front door.
“He made you feel like you were very special, and it was a little bit yours, too,” she says.
Often, music emanated from the windows in the form of Mathis’s sophisticated Bechstein-Welte reproducing piano or perhaps his Violano Virtuoso, an electric, once coin-operated machine that has two violins and an entire upright piano.
As he entered his 80s, Mathis finalized plans for what would happen to his beloved home after his death. He had never married nor had children. He decided to bequeath the house and his collections to the non-profit National Trust for Historic Preservation. His niece says his collections were like his children.
“I, for one, was very happy that he saved it all, and wanted it kept together because after watching all of those years of work, it really would’ve broken my heart just to see it taken apart and divided everywhere. It was a special body of work.”
Mathis’s home would join President Lincoln’s Cottage and the Woodrow Wilson House on the list of the National Trust’s 29 properties.
“They have extremely high standards, so for them to accept this house shows what a special contribution Walter made to preservation and also the care that he maintained on this residence,” says Fischer.
In 2002, Lorie Rombro of the National Trust moved from Washington, D.C., to San Antonio to be collections project manager. With objects on every table, every wall and just about every surface, her job was to create a database. Mathis was still going to work every day and living in the house.
“We had a chance to do what so many museums don’t: You actually have the donor there who can tell you where the objects came from, how he got them and some background information that you might not get if the museum just started once someone had passed away,” Rombro says.
It would take Rombro four years to catalog the collection.
“He wanted it to be kept together, he didn’t want — he would have left it to family members and it would have been taken apart and the house sold,” she says. “I think he worked his whole life on this collection, and it was very important to him and when the National Trust said we think this is wonderful and should be a museum, he agreed and he really liked the idea of people seeing what he collected and that it stayed together as a collection, so it wasn’t everything he worked for kind of scattered.”
Rombro was still working on the database when, in 2005, Mathis died of a stroke at age 86. The following year, she completed the database, which came to more than 12,000 items.
Of the thousands of objects displayed, there was not a single photograph of Mathis. In fact, the most personal thing on display, in an upstairs bedroom, was a framed collection of his military medals — including three Distinguished Flying Crosses — from the 65 combat missions he flew over Germany during World War II.
“On that thin line between modesty and not, because he has his collection, he wanted to make it a museum, he wants people in his home, but he doesn’t have one photograph of himself,” says Villa Finale curator Meg Nowack.
Per his wishes, Mathis was cremated and interred on the grounds of Villa Finale, a small American flag over his gravesite. So, says his niece, “he’s watching over things on a daily basis.”
After his death, the National Trust spent five years readying Villa Finale to be opened as a museum, adding UV blocking film to windows and making necessary accessibility adjustments. But they left his collections in the spaces that Mathis had chosen, and they opted to forgo velvet ropes so that visitors could experience the house as Mathis did.
Today, a staff of nine maintains Villa Finale and gives tours to the general public, as well as workshops on topics such as taking care of heirlooms, textiles and silver. Nowack says Mathis accomplished his goal of showing that one person: “could make a difference in a neighborhood or in a city — and he certainly did.”
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