Who Designed the David Whitney House? Gordon W. Lloyd and Detroit's Grandest Gilded Age Mansion

Gordon W. Lloyd designed the David Whitney House. Construction ran from 1890 to 1894 at 4421 Woodward Avenue, on the southeast corner of Canfield Street in what is now Midtown Detroit. David Whitney Jr., a Watertown-born lumber baron who had moved to Detroit from Lowell in 1857, paid roughly $400,000 for the work — a sum that would buy a small commercial block downtown at the time. The result is the last grand nineteenth-century mansion still standing on Woodward, and the surest answer to the question search engines field about it: the architect was Gordon W. Lloyd (1832–1904), a British-born Welshman who built much of mercantile Detroit's churches, banks, and merchant houses during the post-Civil War boom.

The architect: Gordon W. Lloyd

Lloyd arrived in Detroit in 1858 after training in London under the ecclesiologist Henry Roberts. He spent the next forty-six years putting his stamp on the city. He drew Christ Church on East Jefferson in 1863, Central United Methodist Church at Adams and Woodward in 1867, Dowling Hall for the University of Detroit Mercy in 1890, and the Wright-Kay Building on Woodward in 1891. Most of his commercial work was demolished during the twentieth-century clearances — the Newberry and McMillan Building, the Allan Shelden House, the Henry P. Baldwin House, the Russell A. Alger House — but a handful of survivors trace his arc from English Gothic Revival to the rough-cut Romanesque of his late career.

The Whitney house is the late style at its most exuberant. Lloyd took the French Chateauesque silhouette favored by Richard Morris Hunt for the Vanderbilts and pulled it toward H. H. Richardson's Romanesque, with massive arches, rusticated stone, and round turrets. The American Institute of Architects' AIA Detroit guide calls the result "unique, some would say awkward," which is fair. The house is not a copy of any European model. It is a Detroit lumber baron's translation of European prestige into Dakota stone.

The stone, the rooms, the glass

The exterior is clad in rough-cut pink jasper quarried from South Dakota. The color is closer to rose than red, and it shifts with the weather — gray and brooding in November, warm and pink in low June light. Whitney's contemporaries called it the most expensive house in the state. Twenty-one Tiffany stained-glass windows light the interior, the largest commission Tiffany Studios delivered to a private residence in the Midwest. The plan included fifty-two rooms, ten bathrooms, twenty fireplaces, and an elevator.

Whitney occupied the house only six years before his death in 1900. The family continued to live in it until 1932. The Visiting Nurse Association used the building from 1941 to 1956. Restaurateur Richard Kughn bought it in 1986 and opened it as The Whitney restaurant. It remains a working restaurant and event venue today.

Photographing the house

The southeast corner of Woodward and Canfield gives the cleanest exterior frame in afternoon light. The east-facing turret picks up morning sun. The interior, with its dark woodwork and dim corners, requires lighting. For portrait and event coverage at the Whitney, see our portrait photography page, or contact us through the contact form for permit logistics.