Eberbach Residence Open House
Eberbach Residence
We are having an open house on Sunday, August 11, at the home of Oscar and Minerva Eberbach. The house was built in 1950 at 2250 Belmont and the architect was Walter Sanders. Sanders was on the UM Architectural faculty, including a stint as chair of architecture.
Sanders designed four houses in Ann Arbor while a UM faculty member and worked with Theodore Larsen on the Unistrut method of constructing a house. His own house, in Barton Hills, 99 Barton North Drive is a Unistrut house.
The Eberbach family is a long time Ann Arbor family. This mid century modern home for Oscar and Minerva represents the third generation of Eberbach’s to have rather grand homes here. Oscar’s grandparents, Christian and Margarethe Eberbach, had an 1863 Italianate style house with tower at 1115 Woodlawn. It was outside the town on their farm when it was built. His father Ottmar had an1884 Victorian towered mansion at the corner of South Fourth Avenue and E. William streets; it’s still there, connected to the drive-through beer place (Harris Tire Company originally) to the west.
Christian Eberbach founded a successful drug store and laboratory equipment manufactory in 1843 and was an officer in the Ann Arbor State Bank. Son Ottmar continued in the pharmaceuticals and scientific equipment business. His son Oscar was also in the pharmaceuticals business, was an officer with the Ann Arbor Bank, and an early investor in the Argus Camera Company. He acted as the Treasurer for the University Musical Society for 12 years. He prided himself on having attended _____ continuous years of May Festivals. The Eberbach Corporation is still in business.
Walter Sanders was also a native of Ann Arbor. But he left and then came back in 1949 to join the University of Michigan architecture faculty. He was trained at the University of Illinois and University of Pennsylvania, taught at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. At the UM he worked with Theodore Larsen on the Unistrut experimental materials to build homes. Theodore Larsen’s own home on East Huron River Drive and Sander’s Barton Hills home are two of the few that were constructed. Assembling the panels turned out to be very time-consuming and they never took off as a building material. Walter Sanders continued to teach, established the first in the country PhD program for architects, was brought back to be the chair again in 1971 and passed away in 1972.