Westbrook Estate
Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Roy A. and Gladys Westbrook House is a 2 1/2 story Tudor Revival style home constructed in 1928. The house sits on a 1.5 acre blufftop site in the Park Hill neighborhood that overlooks the Fort Worth Zoo and Forest Park. The Park Hill neighborhood was designed by the noted Kansas City, Missouri, landscape architecture firm of Hare and Hare. The home was designed by prominent Fort Worth architect Joseph L. Pelich, whose residential designs were mostly based on period revival styles. His work can be found throughout Fort Worth's oldest neighborhoods. Pelich also designed the original Casa Manana outdoor theater in Fort Worth. The home has multiple gables and a steeply pitched, slate covered cross-gabled roof. Side gables are decorated with hand-hewn and pegged half-timbering. Other notable features include an arcaded recessed portico, brick battlements, tall brick chimneys with chimney pots, and multiple-light double-hung and diamond-pattern casement windows. The home's interior includes stained and leaded glass windows, ornate wrought iron work, three marble and plaster fireplaces, a tile fountain and plaster coffered ceilings. The grounds and associated landscape features include a three-car garage at the basement level, low brick walls, a stone grotto, a concrete terrace and a swimming pool with a diving tower. Roy A. Westbrook made his fortune in the Hendrick Oilfield in central Winkler County. Westbrook was a founding member of the Fort Worth Petroleum Club and also served as president and director of the Fort Worth Cats Baseball Club. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2009
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Perched on a bluff overlooking the Fort Worth Zoo, this 2½-story Tudor Revival home was built in 1928 for oilman Roy A. Westbrook and his wife Gladys, in a Park Hill neighborhood laid out by the celebrated Hare and Hare landscape firm. Prominent Fort Worth architect Joseph L. Pelich designed it with pegged half-timbering, slate gables, marble fireplaces, and leaded glass. Westbrook's fortune came from the Hendrick Oilfield in Winkler County, and he helped found the Fort Worth Petroleum Club.
Why it matters
The estate captures the wealth the Texas oil boom poured into 1920s Fort Worth and the period-revival mansions that boom built in its finest neighborhoods.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1920s, Fort Worth was riding one of the great money waves in Texas history. Oil had been struck across West Texas, and the fortunes it generated flowed back into the city — into banks, clubs, and, above all, into houses. The decade was a boom time nationally, the Jazz Age of rising cities and new money, and in Fort Worth that energy took architectural form in gracious neighborhoods full of period-revival mansions.
Park Hill, where this house rose in 1928, was exactly the kind of enclave that ambition built. It was laid out by Hare and Hare, the celebrated Kansas City landscape architecture firm whose work shaped parks and planned neighborhoods across the region. Hiring a nationally known firm to design a subdivision was itself a mark of the era's confidence — the belief that a growing Texas city deserved the same thoughtful planning as any older metropolis.
The home's blufftop site overlooking Forest Park and the Fort Worth Zoo placed it among the most desirable perches in the city. This was the geography of success in 1920s Fort Worth: high ground, green views, and a fashionable address, all within reach of a downtown flush with petroleum money.
People & events
The house was built for Roy A. Westbrook and his wife Gladys, and Roy's story is the oil story of his generation. His fortune came out of the Hendrick Oilfield in central Winkler County, one of the West Texas strikes that turned working men into magnates almost overnight. That wealth is written directly into the scale and craftsmanship of the home he commissioned.
Westbrook did not simply retreat into private luxury, though. He was a founding member of the Fort Worth Petroleum Club — the natural gathering place for the men whose money came from oil — and he served as president and director of the Fort Worth Cats Baseball Club. A civic figure as much as a businessman, he tied his name to both the industry that made him and the pastimes that knit a city together.
To design the house, the Westbrooks turned to Joseph L. Pelich, a prominent Fort Worth architect whose residential work favored the period-revival styles then in vogue and can still be found throughout the city's oldest neighborhoods. Pelich's reach extended beyond private homes: he also designed the original Casa Mañana outdoor theater, one of Fort Worth's signature public entertainments. In the Westbrook house he had a client and a budget equal to his ambitions.
Its place in the American story
The Tudor Revival style the Westbrooks chose was one of the defining looks of affluent American neighborhoods in the 1920s. It reached back to the timbered manor houses of medieval and Tudor England, translating that old-world romance into the comfortable homes of new-world success. This house is a full-throated example of the mode, and its features read like a catalog of the style at its most accomplished.
Look at what Pelich assembled: multiple gables under a steeply pitched, slate-covered cross-gabled roof; side gables dressed in hand-hewn and pegged half-timbering; an arcaded recessed portico; brick battlements; and tall brick chimneys topped with chimney pots. Inside, the craftsmanship deepens — stained and leaded glass, ornate wrought iron, three marble and plaster fireplaces, a tile fountain, and plaster coffered ceilings. The grounds carry the theme outdoors with low brick walls, a stone grotto, a concrete terrace, and a swimming pool with a diving tower.
Together these details tell a national story in local stone and slate: how the extraction wealth of the American West financed a romantic, backward-looking domestic architecture, and how a booming city expressed its arrival through the homes its leading citizens built. Recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2009, the estate preserves that convergence of oil money, planned neighborhoods, and revival design.
If you visit
Approach with an eye for the roofline first. A Tudor Revival house lives in its silhouette — the steep pitch, the crossing gables, the tall chimneys with their pots — and this one is meant to be read against the sky. From there, let your gaze drop to the half-timbering on the side gables and remember that it was hand-hewn and pegged, an old joinery tradition revived for effect.
The setting is half the experience. The house sits on a bluff above Forest Park and the Fort Worth Zoo, so the same high ground that made it a prize address in 1928 still gives it a commanding relationship to the greenery below. Take in how the low brick walls, terrace, and landscaped grounds step the property down its 1.5-acre site — this is architecture and landscape designed as one composition, in a neighborhood Hare and Hare planned to feel exactly this way.
This makes a rewarding stop on a tour of Fort Worth's historic residential districts, where Pelich's work turns up again and again. Wander the surrounding Park Hill streets to see the wider fabric of a 1920s boom-era neighborhood, and you'll understand this house not as an isolated mansion but as the crown of a whole planned community.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Roy A. Westbrook
- · Gladys Westbrook
- · Joseph L. Pelich
Themes & tags
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