Tibbals Italian Cottage

This 1939 home was designed by Columbus architect Todd Tibbals (1910–1988) for his personal use.  He designed it to show as many unusual features as possible in a small house. Tibbals was a longtime principal in the Columbus architectural firm of Tibbals, Crumley, and Musson. The house is on Lot 16 of the Utopia Subdivision, a nearly 3 acre development by the Utopia Construction Co. of Marysville, OH, and one of the last sections of this part of Grandview Heights to be platted. The 1938 plat shows Woodhill Drive as Utopia Drive. The street name was changed in 1939 because "residents ran out of retorts to wisecracks about Utopia in Grandview Heights" according to a Columbus Dispatch article. 

Note:  This stop is a private residence. Please respect the owner's privacy and observe the residence from public access points only.  

   

 

Todd Tibbals, at left in photo, on winning team at the 1st Memorial Tournament Pro-Am in 1966 with Jack Nicklaus (second from left) and Scioto Country Club golf pro Tom Weiskopf (center). Tibbals also designed First Community Village in Upper Arlington, OH, in 1963, which featured California-style architecture in an at-the-time novel approach to housing for different levels of health care. Among Tibbals’ other major works were The Ohio State School for the Deaf on Morse Road in Columbus and Drake Union (1971) at The Ohio State University. He and his partner Noverre Musson (who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright) are credited with bringing modernism to Columbus.  

(Photo from Columbus Dispatch)  

The house was featured in the November 1940 Better Homes & Gardens magazine as one of three small homes with inspiration from the past and noticeable door appeal.  Tibbals' inspiration was Italian hill country. The home’s most noticeable feature is the deepset doorway surrounded with blue and white Florentine tile. The whitewashed stone and original red-tile roof were intended to copy Italian homes along the seacoast; original deep blue shutters were a reflection of Mediterranean waters. Under the front window is an original row of glass blocks which flood the kitchen counter with natural light. Better Homes & Gardens called this home “a charming answer to the small house problem.”  

(Photo from Better Homes & Gardens magazine)  

Original floor design as shown in the November 1940 Better Homes & Gardens magazine. Tibbals worked to fit the house into the sloping ravine site as if it had grown there. He made the interior three levels: entrance-level living room, second-level kitchen and dining room, and upper-level bedrooms and bath. This design created the street-front illusion of a single horizontal line.  A picket fence disguised how high the ground sloped at the upper end and how near the windows came to the ground. The original taller plantings at the low end gave a feeling of support to the entrance, and made the shrub line appear level.