Driving on Mann Road in Bartow, one house stands out like an exotic palace among the oaks and pines. Motorists are known to pull up the driveway and gawk, although the owners, Charles and Helen Heiden, aren't particularly fond of the practice. The so-called "Wonder House" was once a tourist attraction, and the Heidens are now working on renovating it, as well as bringing back a few of its eccentric charms.
The man behind the house's construction had a spring of bizarre, yet inspired ideas that he kept drawing upon for decades.
Conrad Schuck moved to the area from Pittsburgh, Penn. in 1926. His health was failing, and his doctor said at the time that he had a year to live. Schuck brought his wife and their seven children, and bought property in Bartow to build his dream house.
With only his sons for help, Schuck laid the foundation and continued to add to it until his death at age 93, about 45 years ago. Building the Wonder House might well have kept him going.
The Wonder House's diverse features have made it stand out through the years. Schuck built a system of mirrors that allowed anyone from anywhere inside the house to see visitors waiting at the front door. When the sunlight hit them right, Charles Heiden says they would fill the house with colorful bits of light. Its 81 doors provided cross-ventilation, and Schuck built a natural cooling system that used rainwater. In a time when electric air conditioning didn't exist to alleviate the Florida heat, the system was particularly unique. Legend has it that Schuck simply added features as they came to them, giving the house its aura of haphazard glory.
"Do you realize that man never had any plans?" Charles Heiden asks.
Schuck apparently didn't create any blueprints, either, until construction was almost over.
"He was ahead of his time," Helen Heiden says.
Like a living thing, the house grew to four stories. The three upper floors originally had front and back porches. Glass and tiles embedded in the outer concrete walls added flecks of color, and patterned mosaics decorated the porch floors.
On the third level's back porch, Schuck installed a fish pond. In the kitchen, he built a rotating cabinet that hid a column encasing the house's electrical wiring. Ceiling panels in the living room were removable and could be decorated and redecorated with ease.
In the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression, though, Schuck seemed to have lost almost everything. In 1934, he decided he could do well for his family by charging visitors 10 cents admission to the strange house, and conducting tours. The house also picked up its "wonderous" name around that time. Old postcards, printed with the words "Wonder House, Bartow, Florida," show the house covered with creeping fig vines, and a well-ordered front yard filled with flowers.
Before Disney World diverted much of Florida tourism to Orlando, the Wonder House attracted some national attention. It was featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not, a syndicated cartoon that saw widespread popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.
During World War II, though, a rumor started that Schuck was using the system of mirrors in the house to signal German planes. FBI officers knocked on the door one day and determined the rumor was baseless. To put an end to the matter, perhaps, Schuck bricked up the fireplace in the central part of the house anyway. The mirrors needed the chimney to reflect properly. Charles Heiden says he plans to tear out the bricks and restore the mirrors.
Although building the Wonder House could have saved Schuck's life, Schuck and his family never actually lived in his dream house. They sold it in the 1960s to the DuCharme family, who were the first to make the house their home. The Heidens, retirees living in Venice, bought it from the DuCharmes in 2002.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, it's going to be so much work and expense,'" Charles Heiden says. "We bought it anyway."
Charles began living there a year later, and Helen moved there permanently in 2005. She quipped that she wanted to make sure Charles created some decent living space before she started living there herself. By then, he had finished with the second and third levels.
Now the 8,400-square-foot house has 20 rooms, including six bedrooms and four bathrooms. The Heidens didn't intend to restore it entirely to its original condition.
"It was quite plain," Charles Heiden says. Instead, he has layered his own inspiration onto Schuck's. Schuck mostly drew from Art Deco sources, Heiden says, but he has used a variety of styles to complement his multicultural antique collection, the result of 45 years of searching for pieces.
He converted the front porch on the second level into a music room and a library, both with giant windows, while keeping the original mosaic floors. He narrowed a doorway in the dining room to make room for a triangular corner cabinet from the 1800s. He did away with the once-vaunted rainwater cooling system, and has central air and heat now. He plans to refinish the rotating cabinet in the kitchen, and add black trim to match the others. On the first level, below the entrance on the second level, the Heidens have plans for a home theater, a bar room, an exercise room, a card room, a dance floor and a summer kitchen.
On the third level back porch, the Heidens have stocked the fish pond with fish caught from the small lake across the street. They commissioned a local artist known as Lone Star to paint a mural above the pond, showing the house as it was at the height of its tourist days.
Now, more than 80 years after Schuck began to build his dream, the quirky Wonder House is still changing, still surprising.
Click here for more pictures of the "Wonder House"
