On a recent sunny afternoon in one of San Antonio’s oldest and most picturesque neighborhoods, preservationists, staff and city officials gathered for a milestone event at Villa Finale Museum and Gardens.
Among them was a representative from the National Trust for Historic Preservation who flew in from Chicago and helped cut the ribbon on the new Mathis Gallery.
Recently completed on the site of Villa Finale, the 1,600-square-foot visitor center and gallery provides a ticket and docent office, gathering and exhibit hall and kitchen for use at the historic property, a nonprofit open to the public.
Mark Stoner, senior director of preservation architecture at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who oversees such projects, praised the work of Villa Finale staff and others in completing the gallery.
“The great challenge here on this project was to locate and design the gallery to pack a lot of functionality into a relatively small space and to complement, but not to compete or distract from, the house in both its sighting and its design,” Stoner said. “The Mathis Gallery does exactly that.”
One of only 27 National Trust sites in the country and the only one in the state, Villa Finale is located on a jasmine-lined street corner in the King William Historic District.
The high-style Italianate mansion houses the fine arts collections of civic leader and preservationist Walter Mathis, who bought and restored the property in 1967.
Mathis also purchased another 13 houses in King William and sold them to preservation-minded individuals, turning the tide on a historic but declining neighborhood which then became San Antonio’s first designated historic district.
In 2004, Mathis bequeathed his “final home” and extensive collections to the National Trust, a privately funded nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Mathis died in 2005.
The gallery project has been in the works for several years, said Villa Finale Executive Director Jane Lewis. Several of Mathis’ commercial properties in the area were sold 11 years ago in order to secure funding to build the $1.2 million Mathis Gallery.
“It was his legacy to have his home become a museum and, of course, you can’t be a museum if you don’t have some way to support the guests that come,” Lewis said of the decision to build the gallery.
Monthly, more than 600 people visit Villa Finale, which is also a showcase for 12,800 objects, she said. The gallery will allow the staff to better serve visitors and display the collections.
Sylvia M. Gonzalez-Pizaña, deputy director and curator, said she and other staff will move from the carriage house to the gallery, just steps away, in about a month.
Construction began six months ago and crews from Troy Jessee Construction are putting the finishing touches on the building.
Architect Mac White of San Antonio-based firm of Michael G. Imber Architects designed The Mathis Gallery, which he feels is “connected” to the main house but is not a duplication.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s competing, and it needs to be a big space that can serve all these purposes, and also feel intimate, feel like it’s sort of nestled into this site and taking cues from all the different materials on the property,” he said.
“I’m already seeing it functioning the way we’d envisioned, which is great,” White added.
