Property Type: Residential
County: Ada  |  Building Status: Private  |  Year Built: 1964  |  Architectural Style: Modernist
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In May of 1962 The Highlands Inc. sold a lot in the Upper Highlands to Ethel Chapman, President and owner of The Mode Ltd. department store. At the end of 1963 she completed paperwork for a $60,000 dollar mortgage from the Title and Trust Co. and moved into the house in 1964. Chapman selected Jedd Jones of the Boise architectural firm of Hummel, Hummel, and Jones as her architect. Jones had been the architect for the reconstruction of her department store after a devastating fire in 1958, and he was highly sought as a residential designer with commissions on Warm Springs Avenue and Harrison Boulevard. The striking modernistic house that he designed was a significant departure from the massive, sandstone and half-timbered Tudor Revival home on Warm Springs Avenue that Chapman had occupied since 1932.

The Highland View house capitalized on the best aspects of mid-century American Internationalism and stunning views of downtown. Clean lines, flat roofs, and interior and exterior walls faced in quartzite are accented by a recessed, open, entry approach, an exquisite, multi-vaulted pavilion roof above the living room, and a beautifully-rendered original metal gate accessing the tiled courtyard near the street. A sympathetic bedroom addition at the west end commissioned by the home?s third owner in the late 1990s required the re-opening of the original source of Oregon quartzite.

Ethel Dolson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1894 but soon moved with her family to Denver, Colorado. There she met, and in 1915, married John Chapman, a childhood friend. Chapman, an accountant, worked in Denver and Casper, Wyoming where he began a career in retail management. The Chapmans moved to Boise in 1930 where John accepted the position of General Manager for C. C. Anderson?s Golden Rule department stores. Ethel initially committed herself to civic and volunteer activities but when John purchased The Mode department store in 1938, Ethel began to engage in the business as a buyer and partner in management. After John?s death in 1943, Ethel assumed control of the company which she guided until selling it in 1969. She sold her Highland View home in 1976 and died in Boise in 1988.

This home was on the 11th Annual Heritage Home Tours in 2013, thanks to the generosity of current homeowners Clay and Jan Carley.