Cross the McCallum Street bridge toward Chestnut Hill and you won’t see the house at all. The trees have grown in until it all but disappears behind them. You need to pass through the front gates, on a drive that curves along a shaded diagonal, to reach the massive Tudor Revival house.

This is Krisheim, built between 1910 and 1912 by George and Gertrude Woodward on a bluff above the Wissahickon valley.

Constructed from stone dug from the ground it stands on, dressed and laid up by some of the best craftsmen of their day, the house sits low and solid, as if the hillside had always meant to hold it. The house drops as the terrain does, sloping rather than rising.

Thick slate shingles, some heavy as pavers, anchor the roofline, and carved oak cornices throw deep shadows across the walls. Gables and chimneys break into view as one drives onto the property, with the irregular rhythm of staggered rooflines keeping the exceptional craftsmanship from ever presenting as too formal. The balance comes from repetition rather than symmetry: the same gable, the same deep overhang, echoed at different points around the building, so the whole thing reads as ordered without repeating itself.

After decades spent as a Presbyterian conference center and then a nine-unit apartment building, Krisheim is back to its former glory, and once again home to a Woodward. The story of how it got there, and the family behind it, will be the focus of an upcoming book on the Woodwards, co-written by designer Justin Detwiler and historian David Contosta.

The man responsible is George and Gertrude Woodward’s great-grandson, Charles “Chuck” Woodward, who grew up running the halls of Krisheim. He knew the house as the home base for the earliest generation of his family, one that was gone by the time he came of age. What he wanted, once he had the chance, was to bring it back.

That chance came in his twenties, when Chuck moved into one of the nine apartments the house had been divided into around 1984. A little more than three decades later, the work still isn’t finished. He started with the grounds, hiring landscape architect Rob Fleming to re- store the gardens the Olmsted Brothers had designed over a period of years, beginning in 1901. Eventually, in 2015, he brought on Justin Detwiler of John Milner Architects to take on the house itself.

“He wanted us to put it all back exactly as it was, no matter what it took,” says Detwiler, who devoted five years to the project. “And that’s a very rare circumstance.”

Chuck has been living there since the project was substantially completed in 2020, in a house that represents both his past and his present. Although the house and grounds were faithfully restored, they also include subtle touches that represent Chuck and his wife, Anna.

“Krisheim is not just a house,” says Detwiler. “It’s a physical presence of all that the Woodwards believed in.”

An American landscape

George and Gertrude Woodward were not the buttoned-up Victorians their wealth might suggest. Gertrude rode horseback in chaps and pants well into her eighties. So did George. They spent summers camping in Wyoming, and on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the two of them got in a canoe and paddled it up the Schuylkill, from Manayunk to Conshohocken.

Nature wasn’t just a backdrop for them. It was closer to a primary starting point, which is why they hired Frederick Olmsted, Jr. and his brother John Charles to design their grounds long before they considered the house itself. Their firm continued the work of their own father, Frederick Law Olmsted, considered the father of American landscape architecture. Its commissions encompassed private estates, college campuses and parks — including Acadia National Park and Yosemite Valley.

“They spent ten years planning that property, working on the landscape, the site, and the gardens,” says Contosta.

“They wanted the home to be finished in a mature landscape,” Detwiler says. “It’s backwards from the way most people would do it.”

George had strong opinions about what the gardens should look like, and he wasn’t shy about saying so in writing. In one letter to the Olmsted office, pushing back against proposed ornament and limestone balustrades, he made his position plain: “I told you that we were unwilling to be put in the same class with Pierpont Morgan and P.A.B. Widener, and this explains our feeling against the niche, the grotto, the flower beds, the balusters, and the terminal belvedere…These formal designs, in my opinion, do not fit the American landscape.”

Impressed by their work in Newport, Rhode Island, the Woodwards hired the Boston firm Peabody and Stearns to design the house itself.

But Newport wasn’t the model so much as the introduction. What went up in Chestnut Hill was not intended to impress the type of wealthy owners of Newport resorts. “They wanted to keep it very low to the ground, the whole house, because they wanted it nestled into the landscape,” Detwiler says. “There’s letter after letter saying lower, lower, lower.” The house drops as it follows the contours of the land, he says. “You’re literally sinking it down into the earth.”

The building material also answered to the land. The Wissahickon schist, as it came to be called, was dug from the property itself. And it was handled in a way that broke from how the stone was normally used. “Normally schist is more of a rubble stone,” Detwiler says. “But here they’re cutting and dressing it into blocks, making it formal, almost like a granite or a limestone. But it’s still the local stone.”

The diamond in the crown

That instinct for the house to carefully respond to the land ended up shaping far more than one estate. The Woodwards went on to build hundreds of housing units in Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy, all planned to be harmonious with the natural landscape, and each other.

It was just a decade or so later that the couple began working with a trio of Philadelphia architects to further develop these ideas. They constructed roughly 230 of the iconic stone residences that now define so much of Northwest Philadelphia, working with the same schist and wooded slopes to formalize what’s now known as the Wissahickon Style – houses that seem to grow out of the land instead of sitting on top of it. Nearly all of them are still standing.

But Krisheim came first.

“It’s the diamond in the crown,” Detwiler says. “It is from here that everything happened.”

The house literally wears that legacy. Carvings above the front door mark the zodiac signs of the Woodwards’ children by their birth months. In the entry vestibule, George and Gertrude’s initials are set into the stone. A stained glass window at the stair landing carries the family tree, along with the birth and death dates of five generations of the family, current through all the great-great-grandchildren.

One of the Woodwards’ closest friends was the painter Violet Oakley, who lived close by in a house called Cogslea. She was, according to Detwiler, “practically a member of the family.” When George and Gertrude were planning Krisheim, Oakley was already well known as being socially progressive, eventually sharing her Mount Airy home with her life partner, the artist Edith Emerson. Oakley had recently become the first woman in the country awarded a major public mural commission, the statehouse mural in Harrisburg. She painted Krisheim’s sunroom ceiling, a space which now serves as the family’s favorite intimate dining area.

“This family’s history, and values, are carved into the DNA of the building itself,” Detwiler says. “Every fireplace has words either chiseled into it or set in tile, quotes that they loved, and symbols about their philosophies about life and nature.”

She called the shots

While history has largely remembered George as the driving force behind the family’s work, the philosophy and design ideas belonged to Gertrude just as much.

“All of the architectural drawings of the homes that they built in the area say Dr. George Woodward,” says Contosta. “And yes, he was the business face of it, but Gertrude weighed in on every design. She had very strong opinions about the landscape and the architecture. She is the major force behind Pastorius Park. Some projects were entirely hers. The Chestnut Hill Community Center, for instance, was Gertrude’s baby.”

Family memory holds that both Gertrude and George worked on the details together. According to Contosta, their son Stanley remembered both parents on their hands and knees on the floor, going over blueprints. And it was Gertrude who wrote to the Olmstead Brothers to say the family couldn’t afford to build any more houses in Pastorius Park. She controlled the purse strings, and called the shots.

“She’s a Victorian woman,” born in 1868, Contosta says. “She didn’t think it was seemly to be out in front. She was very happy for her husband to be the public face of the business. But really, behind the scenes, Gertrude was pulling a lot of the strings.”

A legacy project

Although most of the restoration was completed several years ago, the work still hasn’t stopped. Anna, Chuck’s wife, has taken over much of the garden, which Detwiler says is “better than ever.” Small projects keep surfacing, a piece of stone here, a section of masonry there, the kind of upkeep an estate this size never really outgrows.

“It was a real passion project for me, a real labor of love,” Detwiler says. “A property and project like this is never finished. There’s more masonry work that’s happening, and there’s always things in the garden that need attention. It’s Chuck’s life’s work, this house.”

George kept his own running record of life at Krisheim while he was alive, writing a monthly letter to family and friends that he called the “Krisheim News.” Today, life continues at Krisheim for another generation of the Woodward family and their friends.

“I can think of few houses that are as intimately tied to a family as Krisheim,” Detwiler says.