Chandor Gardens

Douglas Chandor, born in Surrey in 1897, painted portraits of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover and Queen Elizabeth II, among others. He met Ina Kuteman Hill, of Weatherford, at a New York dinner party, and they married in 1934. In 1936 they began a house and garden they called White Shadows on her family's ground in Weatherford.

The city says Chandor made his greatest work from 3.5 acres of barren hillside, using picks, shovels and dynamite to cut a series of garden rooms with English and Chinese motifs, planting more than 150 trees. The house, designed with the architect Joseph Pelich, was built in 1936 as a studio with a bedroom, kitchen and bath, since the couple spent half of each year in New York. A 27-foot studio ceiling rises over a 17-foot window.

Chandor died in 1953, and Ina renamed the place Chandor Gardens and kept it open to the public until shortly before her death in 1978. For sixteen years it stood unattended and overgrown. Melody and Chuck Bradford bought it in 1994 and restored it, and the City of Weatherford purchased it in May 2002 and reopened it that fall. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. The gardens are open Tuesday through Sunday; the house interior opens to the public on the second Tuesday of each month.