James O. Kemp House

by Tim Gilmore, 3/8/2024

1. Kelsey and Isaiah

Ironic, really, that this stark white minimalistic house should be such a chameleon, its architect such a mystery. Is the house stark and austere, or airy and light? Every house reflects its inhabitants, but not like the house that architect James O. Kemp built as his personal residence in 1961. The fact that Kemp should be a phantom, having designed so many buildings in Florida, in Jacksonville, and particularly in Jacksonville’s vast Arlington district, seems a bitter irony.

Deceptive, really, the muchness of this house that’s so minimal. Its new owners, Kelsey Heinze and Isaiah Abenchuchan, young vintage furniture and art dealers, welcome me warmly one Tuesday morning. They’re light and bright. Their hair is long and their feet are bare. I take so much of my impressions of the house from Kelsey and Isaiah that I’m surprised later at how differently this same house has lived in different lives.

They speak of the house “compositionally,” of how a newly purchased painting or coffee table relates to the house’s lines, angles and spaces. If they try an “object” here and it doesn’t “work,” they sell it. This house would seem to have been designed for them if it weren’t more than twice their age. They’re its third owners.

Kelsey and Isaiah bought the house from the estate of William Mauney, also a vintage dealer, who had fallen from the roof while trimming trees and died in the hospital. They pulled up worn purple and red shag carpeting and brought maroon painted walls back to their original white. Except for the additions Kemp added when he moved his elderly parents in with him in the late ’70s, the house resembles its earliest years now more than it has in decades. It’s a vibrantly ghostly dialectic.

Craft and vision align in the house’s design. You might say a structure is built of wood or brick or steel, but this house is made of light, of luster, of openness and air, materials that take the form of floor-to-ceiling windows, terrazzo floors and concrete block. Form may follow function, yes, but in this house, execution seems the consequence of poetics.

An architect’s personal residence is a kind of self-portrait. Most architects build one. Sometimes that comes later in life and career. James O. Kemp designed and built his just two years after passing his architectural board exams. The new Arlington neighborhood of University Park featured ranch style and split level houses in a Brady Bunch aesthetic, with two or three houses significant in that architectural style later dubbed Mid-Century Modern.

This morning, Kelsey and Isaiah sit on a ruched modular sofa that looks like it’s made of meringue and crescents around a blond table of goat parchment that swirls in a nautilus. They talk about their styles and methods of decorating. They don’t like to rush the experiment. I’ll soon find that Kemp needed each furnishing bolted in place, but Kelsey and Isaiah keep an easy flow. They moved in just before the Covid Pandemic started in 2020 and lived here for two and a half years before they had a couch or sofa. What works in certain spaces works and what doesn’t they change.

“I wanted everything to be white as a canvas and then the furniture and the artwork and objects could pop with color,” Kelsey says. She majored in photography at Savannah College of Art and Design. Isaiah’s an American Sign Language interpreter. She sees the house in curves and colors, in shadows and angles, an assemblage of still lifes or photographs.

Kemp’s later additions to the house created a back bedroom on either side, two stories, open to the ceiling, with clerestory windows. The original design retains the house’s three front courtyards, including an enclosed patio off each small front bedroom and the front central courtyard, which stands between a brise soleil of breezeblocks and a living room with floor-to-ceiling front windows.

It’s an elegant Mid-Century Modern paradox shared with other houses of the time, like Bob Broward’s Butterfly House in Arlington’s Alderman Park. The front room and courtyard mirror each other, bringing outside in and inside out. The front wall of windows makes the outside world visible from inside, while the breezeblock wall keeps the inside private from the street. The living room looks comfortably into the blue daytime sky, or into the stars on a clear night.

2. Laura (and the Snakes)

This very same house, this very same architectural design, same minimalism and bareness / spareness and purity, is a very different house through Laura Atkins, the architect’s daughter. When James O. Kemp inhabited this house, he inhabited every line, every angle, every expanse and recess.

The house felt “controlled” and Laura calls her father “controlling.” She says, “The design is very clean, very stripped down. The house wasn’t a place for living in. There could never be clutter. There were no,” and she pauses thoughtfully before saying, with emphasis, “things.” There could be nothing, she says, that wasn’t part of the design.

She lived here from six months of age to six years, when her parents divorced, then spent summers in the house until her late teens. After the divorce, she moved with her mother first to the St. Pete area, then to North Carolina and finally Colorado, where she lives now. Her two brothers live in Colorado and her sister in California. A basement flood destroyed early family photos.

She calls the design of the house “brilliant,” but says it never felt like home. She speaks carefully, never rushed, frequently stopping to think about, as an architect might, how she wants to put things. In place of anger, she laughs often at specific absurdities.

It’s illustrative of her father’s personality, she says, that most of the furniture was built-in. In the front bedrooms, dressers and desks were built-in at the back. She and her sister shared the bedroom closer to the river, while the boys were on the other side of the house. The galley kitchen had a built-in dining room table and bar stools. “As little kids, we had to climb up or be placed on the bar stools. We were like objects to be placed certain ways around the house.”

One of the few exceptions to her father’s order and tight control, Laura says, were the snakes her brother, Jim, Jr., collected while wandering the wooded riverbanks. He kept them a pit in the back yard, from which Laura stayed far away.

Once, when she was 16 years old, visiting for the summer, Laura and her father were in the midst of a casual conversation, when he said, “My therapist tells me I’m a narcissist.” She remembers the moment vividly, calls it a gift. “For the rest of my life that moment has explained so much,” she says.

There are architects who can let their buildings grow and there are strict originalists, architects whose designs must remain always as first drawn. Laura remembers her father telling her and her siblings, as children, that he’d never wanted kids. What he really wanted, he told them, were robots.

3. Cheryl and Betty

I’m sitting across from sliding-glass doors at an assisted living facility, talking to Betty Schnitzer and her daughter Cheryl Claxton. Betty will be 98 in May. She moved into the house next door to James and Shirley Kemp in 1962 and stayed there for 60 years. She warns me repeatedly, “I’m prejudiced toward Shirley.” Six decades ago, Betty would visit Shirley, whom she remembers as “a doll,” to have coffee and smoke cigarettes in the Kemps’ kitchen. At a time when it was rare, Shirley helped Betty through her divorce and then Betty helped Shirley through hers.

“She was jealous that I had a job,” she says. “I was an elementary school teacher and had a maid at home, but Shirley was always at home with her four children.” Betty also had four children and a family across the street had seven. Some of them still keep in touch. Cheryl followed her mother into teaching elementary school.

James O. Kemp, Betty says, “was tall and good looking and a charmer,” but had trouble hanging onto his marriages and his business. “He always wanted Shirley to be different than she was,” Betty says. “He wanted her to be more educated, though he’d married her right out of high school. She was a brunette, but he wanted a blonde, so she dyed her hair.” Betty says, “His second wife, Freda, she told me, ‘I came into this marriage with lots of money and I’m leaving it with none.’” He did, however, help Betty rebuild her back bedroom and add closet space, all without charging her for it, “just to be a good neighbor.”

In the early ’80s, Kemp’s growing financial troubles and cascading mortgages caught up with him and he went bankrupt and lost the house. He’d run a successful practice, designing armories around the state, Our Lady of Lakes Roman Catholic Church in Deltona and Jacksonville’s Arlington Animal Hospital and Spring Glen United Methodist Church. Losing the house was a low point in his life. “He knew he had done it to himself,” Laura says. “He enjoyed nice cars. He made the money, but had no control over it.”

What Laura and Cheryl and Betty tell me about Kemp’s relationships and finances casts his need for tight control of his artistic vision in new light. True art requires an intense sensitivity, the danger of which is that devotion to one’s art can make that sensitivity a selfishness. It’s not an excuse, nor a defense. Artists must be considered the human beings they are – as spouses, friends, fathers and mothers, just like everyone else, even as they must be defined by their art.

4. Jim, Jr. (and Barbra Streisand)

“I never liked the house,” James Kemp, Jr. tells me from Colorado, “but the thing I loved most was that NuTone stereo intercom system” that connected the record player and radio to vinyl speakers in each room. Likewise, his sister Laura says, “The record player is my only really good memory of the house.” Jim says the kids liked talking to each other through the intercom, but also: “My older sister Teri loved Barbra Streisand and I couldn’t stand Barbra Streisand.” So when he heard “You must remember this, / A kiss is still a kiss,” coming through the speaker in his room, he’d disconnect the wiring.

Jim remembers an earlier house too. He was two years old when his parents built the ranch style house at 7003 Holiday Road. His father worked as a draftsman for KBJ Architects, though not related to William Kemp of the originally named Kemp, Bunch and Jackson. While cutting rafters at that house, James Kemp sawed off half his thumb, everything from the top knuckle.

While Laura recalls not being able to leave toys out, Jim says, “If you wanted a long room for your Matchbox cars, our terrazzo floors were superior to the hardwood and carpeting in every other home. You didn’t come to our house for curling up and watching a movie, but the bar stools made the perfect place to anchor your track and you’d get some really high performance.”

After his siblings ceased having anything to do with their father, Jim maintained a relationship, “because,” he said, “he’s my father.” Like his siblings, he admired his father’s mind, says, “He always loved any technical challenge.” He’s proud of his father’s career, of the fingerprint he left on this city, though the city itself, as it’s often done with its artists, seems largely to have forgotten him. He’s glad the house has new life, one that respects James O. Kemp’s original vision.

I keep thinking about the NuTone system. Before I left the house last week, Isaiah had put on a Simon and Garfunkel record. It matched the spirit and tone he and Kelsey have brought to the house. I snuck a photo of the couple facing each other, talking and smiling, barefoot and bright.

5. Kelsey and Isaiah (and James O. Kemp and Anne)

There’s a double movement in the purity of this house’s design. It’s every bit James O. Kemp’s house and as the “body of his work” replaces his own body in the world, will always be his, but it’s also Kelsey’s and Isaiah’s now. I see how its clean lines could make (and have made) for “built-in” lives, but also how those same lines now free up lighter spirits.

Kelsey and Isaiah hope to have kids one day and they see this house as theirs, not just a starter home. They’ve been talking about getting married at the Unitarian Universalist church nearby, architect Robert Broward’s favorite of all his buildings. Old photos they’ve tracked down help them know the house, its life before them, its evolution through them.

Here’s Anne Kemp, the architect’s mother, in one black and white photo, surrounded by friends on the back patio. Anne, who will live to be 103, holds an ashtray in her lap and cigarette in hand.

In two later photos, in color now, from the ’70s, the architect and his mother dance, both smiling, on an “Oriental” rug in the back room.

Then his parents stand beside a Christmas tree, Anne holding a small poodle in a red sweater, the front windows (notably with drawn drapes) and bris soleil behind them.

Life translates architecture, and after each of this house’s previous lives, Kelsey and Isaiah began their online vintage retail business here. They’ve now opened the Villa Gallery in St. Augustine.

While the house’s lines may have kept previous lives “built-in,” its minimalism offers its new owners the freedom to “pop” color off its white. The house is finally home, “a space,” Kelsey says, “in which we can both feel creative and feel a sense of ease.”