Schultz family Wayne Estate house at 211 Walnut Ave. – interior pictures

The “Wayne Estate” houses built in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s by Wendell and Treat have always seemed to your columnist to form the never changing architectural background of Wayne and St. Davids. Many other houses, exemplifying more modern styles of building, appear in various parts of our two suburbs, some set in the midst of a block of those Wayne Estate houses, others built in sections of the township as yet undeveloped in the late 1900’s. At present the popular ranch type house in all of its variations seems to dot the landscape in every direction on every road on which one may drive.

The Wayne Estate houses are certainly not beautiful – yet withall they have a dignity all their own, and certainly they have been substantially built. To this fact, anyone who has ever sought to make either exterior or interior alterations can testify – and there are few of these houses that have not been changed in one way or another in the 60 years or more since they were built. Yet “once a Wayne Estate house, always a Wayne Estate House”. There is no camouflaging their architectural style.

With all the structural changes that have taken place in most of these houses, there is even more change in the mode of furnishings. For the first time since your columnist has become interested in these houses, she has found some excellent photographs of interiors as shown in the three illustrations with today’s column. Like several other recent pictures, they are from the collection of George W. Schultz, who came to Wayne with his mother and father as a young man in 1888.

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The first picture shows the hallway of the Schultz home, in the 200 block on Walnut avenue; the second the drawing room and the third the dining room. This was the Victorian era of furnishing, more formal and more ornate than any that has followed it. As the Schultz family had lived in Philadelphia, on West Franklin Square, before moving to the new suburb of Wayne, much of their furnishings perhaps came from “the town house”. At any rate these furnishings are probably typical of a really comfortable home that was “modern” in the middle eighties.

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To some few these pictures will bring back some nostalgic memories of a childhood spent in just such comfortable and home-like surroundings. To others they will represent in general the home background of parents or even of grandparents, a background the present younger generation only knows through the eyes of an older generation. To that younger generation a “drawing room” is practically an unknown quantity!

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But to all alike these pictures of one of the first Wayne Estate houses to be purchased and occupied will be of more than passing interest.