One might question how two homes constructed nearly a century apart can be linked.
It just comes natural to homebuilder Bert Loeb, who was introduced to the two homes by friend and architect Mark Wasswiler. One is now for sale.
Submitted / TPI Bert Loeb’s home looks east from Titus over Lake Jordan. Loeb debated moving into the home but chose to stay in a log cabin next door he renovated.
“He brought me up in 2005 to try and talk me into buying a log cabin that was built in 1929,” Loeb said. “The cabin was run down. It was scary. The lot was overgrown.”
Wasswiler was trying to get his wife to agree to buy the cabin.
“I fell in love with it and said if you don’t buy it, I will,” Loeb said.
Wasswiler ended up buying the two neighboring lots on the Titus side of Lake Jordan. Loeb landed the cabin. Wasswiler started building a custom home down at the water’s edge while Loeb worked on his cabin.
“What’s funny is (Wasswiler) didn’t have any plans,” Loeb said. “He was drawing it as he went. It was all in his head.”
Wasswiler met with carpenters and left plans for framing on napkins and scrap pieces of paper for the week. There was no real budget, something unusual for an architect.
“Most of them are going to want to know what it is going to cost before they start it,” Loeb said. “He was paying for it as it went.”
Wasswiler was primarily a commercial architect but did design some homes in Montgomery that Loeb constructed.
Wasswiler’s Lake Jordan home was never completed. He got it mostly framed in, installed a few windows and an ice and water wrap on the roof. Wasswiler then died in 2009.
The home sat uncompleted and vacant for years.
Meanwhile, Loeb frequented his one-bedroom, one-bathroom log cabin complete with traditional chinking. But he had plans to expand it. It took a few years but he added another bedroom and a bath.
“I was knocking on people’s doors where I saw barns falling down,” Loeb said. “There is not a bit of sheet rock in it. I wanted to keep it period. I used barn wood on the walls inside. It is still very rustic. It is really a neat place.”
Over the years Loeb and friends would be on his dock and listen to boaters question what happened to the house next door. Storms would come. The Wasswiler home would get leaves in it. But the ice and water wrap kept the rains out and the lack of windows kept the air moving and the mold and mildew out.
Someone eventually bought the home but it still wasn’t completed. It went on the market again about four years ago.
“I wanted to kind of control what was happening next to me, so I ended up buying it,” Loeb said.
He brought in Montgomery architect Andy Smith to draw up plans to finish the home.
“We looked at it,” Loeb said. “He created some plans from what was already there. Nobody knows what (Wasswiler’s) final vision of it was going to be. We had to frame in a few interior rooms, bathrooms. We really didn’t change the footprint. Andy was creative in some of the stuff he did.”
Some of the cedar roof decking was exposed underneath all these years and is there in Loeb’s version of Wasswiler’s home.
“It is in great shape for how long it sat,” Loeb said. “It has weathered some pretty serious storms over the years as well.”
The Wasswiler home has 3,314 square feet, 4 beds, 6 baths. It sits on a 1.32 acre lot.
Loeb then had two completed neighboring homes on the Titus side of Lake Jordan and decided to make — cabin or house.
“It’s a cool house, it’s really special,” Loeb said. “If I weren’t so in love with this log cabin I would be moving into it.”
