UO McMorran House Repairs
In order to address deferred maintenance issues and to make the McMorran House ready for the University’s 19th president, John Karl Scholz, and his family to move in, Rowell Brokaw has been working closely with several firms: KCL Engineering and Phoenix Mechanical on HVAC upgrades; Bridgeway Contracting, LLC on non-historic window replacement in the kitchen addition; and Fortis Construction on historic window replacement and general envelope maintenance. For all these projects, Construction Focus has provided cost estimating.
Built in 1925, the McMorran House was one of the original houses in the emerging Fairmount neighborhood in Eugene. George McMorran, a successful local businessman, hired Roscoe D. Hemenway, a UO graduate and celebrated Portland architect, to build this prime example of a Tudor Revival and Norman Farmhouse style house. The extensive gardens are assumed to be the work of Oregon landscape architect George H. Otten. McMorran sold the house to the University of Oregon in 1941. Since that time, nearly every president of the University of Oregon has lived here.
Because of its historic significance both for the University and Eugene, the team is paying careful attention to the house’s finer details. In order to preserve the original character of the house, the home’s leaded lights were removed from their sashes, restored, and reinstalled with an exterior storm slip to preserve the original glass while improving the thermal performance of the window. Another interesting detail is the original Doug fir flooring that was found as an underlayment to the carpeting. Where we would now use plywood, the builders back then used planks of Doug fir. With its super tight vertical grain, this flooring is now considered cabinetry grade.
