The recent restoration of two important buildings by Gene Leedy has garnered renewed interest in the architect’s influence on Florida modernism. The house Leedy built for himself in 1957, shortly after leaving the office of Ralph Twitchell and Paul Rudolph, brought the tropical cosmopolitanism of the Sarasota School to the central Florida town of Winter Haven, while his nearby office project marked the transition to a formal vocabulary of precast concrete that he would employ in civic, commercial, and residential projects over a 60-year career.
Max Strang, architect and founder of STRANG, grew up in a midcentury Leedy home. Strang would eventually work in Leedy’s office and attend his alma mater, the University of Florida. At STRANG, Max has spent decades grappling with Leedy’s legacy, which emphasized site specificity, structural expression, and a concern for sustainability. Then, when Leedy passed away in 2018, Strang acquired the two properties that had served as his mentor’s home and office for 58 and 62 years, respectively. He promised to restore them faithfully.
Strang knew both buildings well. As a kid he was a frequent guest at the architect’s home. As he recounted to Anne-Marie Russell, “I was getting this architectural education without even knowing.” Both structures had recently sustained damage during Hurricane Irma; the house lost its iconic trellis and part of its signature concrete block garden wall when the storm uprooted a large tree. The office had also suffered from vandalism and had vegetation growing out of its roof. Throughout the restoration process he asked, “What would Gene do?”
For the house, Strang began by evaluating six decades’ worth of additions and emendations to determine which version of the home to reveal. In the 1980s Leedy had converted the small carport into a two-bedroom wing, which nearly doubled the size of the original, 1,100-square-foot structure and better defined the courtyard at the heart of the property. Inside, he restored the clear-finished wood veneer surfaces of the built-in furnishings, reinstalled cork flooring to match Leedy’s original design, and focused on returning the house to an honest expression of materials and a seamless spatial flow between its indoor and outdoor living spaces.
Strang lauds the human scale of the house, whose simplicity and efficiency he likens to that of a boat. At both the house and the 1961 office building Leedy designed for his firm, Strang sifted through an abundance of furniture his mentor accumulated over the years. “It was like a chair museum,” he recalled. Strang returned the house and office to their original ensemble of Knoll and Herman Miller furnishings and added some pieces (such Barcelona chairs and a Barcelona couch) that fit the midcentury setting perfectly. Small tributes to Leedy are included throughout the house, like a half-finished bottle of Macallan and a cigar sitting in a glass ashtray.
The house was the first of ten built by Dick Craney, a local developer and construction materials supplier who commissioned Leedy to design prototype houses for up to 70 neighboring lots. Colloquially known as Leedyland, the Craney Spec Houses Historic District was listed on the National Register in 2019. It sits less than three miles east of Leedy’s architectural office, which Strang also restored.
The small office building marked a major inflection point in Leedy’s trajectory as a designer. He embraced a robust vocabulary of precast concrete structural members, including the prestressed “double-tee” elements, which became a signature. Strang uses the office as a remote work outpost for his 45-person firm, and both office and house host company retreats and public tours. Strang plans to soon invite artists and scholars in residence under the aegis of Double Tee Arts, a nonprofit he founded to further Leedy’s legacy. “Simply put, this is one of Florida’s best buildings,” said Strang, “and we want to share it.”