The Keeper's Story

The National Trust tells a restoration tale at San Antonio house.

By ALLEN FREEMAN

Villa Finale, San Antonio, Texas (Lorrie Rombro)

In the mid 1960s, Walter Nold Mathis bought and restored an 1870s limestone mansion on King William Street just a five-minute walk from downtown San Antonio. A successful investment banker and member of a family that first settled the city of the Alamo in 1731, Mathis made Villa Finale, as the Italianate house is called, his home and show place for his collections of historic artifacts. He subsequently bought and restored other houses in the Victorian neighborhood, which led to its designation as the King William Historic District.

About 20 years ago, Mathis recalled recently, he began talking to the National Trust about how to preserve his house and its contents for future generations. "I admired the work of the Trust on other properties," he said, "and decided it was the best place for this house." He has since bequeathed the house and its contents to the Trust and generously endowed their future. Villa Finale is his gift to the city of San Antonio, he says, a means to convey an impression of Texas life in the 19th century. It will become a house museum.

A hardware merchant named Russell C. Norton built Villa Finale, employing some of the skilled German stonemasons and carpenters who had immigrated to Texas in the middle of the 19th century. Subsequent owners and residents included a rancher, a trail boss, and, just before Mathis purchased it, renters of eight apartments into which the old house had been carved. Mathis spent a year on a meticulous restoration. He had the shaped tin shingles on the tower roof scraped down, for instance, and replaced the ones that were missing. The surviving cypress shutters were restored, and exact reproductions filled in for the ones that were missing.

Last year, the Trust began to examine the collections that fill the mansion. They include items related to Napoleon, which Mathis started collecting at age 11; Bohemian glass; works by Texas artists; Mexican art; and about 300 stickpins. "The furniture and silver collections and many others were started by members of my family," he says.

"There are about 20,000 items to be inventoried," says Lorie Rombro, the Mathis collections project manager. She's taking a digital image of each object and interviewing Mathis, who she says has "a spectacular memory for everything." She estimates the project to last two years.

When the house comes to the Trust, "We'll be interpreting the story of a preservationist," says Jim Vaughan, a Trust vice president. "It will be the story of the house from the early 1960s, and the citizen who bought this house, restored it, and then set about to restore others in the neighborhood until the concept caught on. "The message for preservationists is that one person can make a difference."

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