3316 W Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee, WI, USA

Edward J. Dahinden House

The Edward J. Dahinden House is a large Craftsman-style house built in 1914 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for an officer of the Franzen Paper Company. In 1986 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.


Description and history

Edward Dahinden was an organizer of the Franzen Paper Company. He served as secretary and treasurer of the company and then president. During that time he had Milwaukee architect Charles Tharinger design a home for him, and it was built in 1914. The house is 2+1⁄2 stories, in the then-popular Craftsman style, clad in dark brick and stucco, with a full-width front porch, and a jerkin-head gable roof with wide eaves. The NRHP nomination deems it "one of the largest and best Bungalow style residences in the city."

After serving as a residence, the building housed a doctor's office and then a law office.

National Register of Historic Places - Edward J. Dahinden House

Statement of Significance:

The Edward J. Dahinden House is locally significant as an example of Bungalow style residential architecture. Built in 1914 for Dahinden, it is one of the largest and best preserved Bungalow style residences in the city. It was designed by Milwaukee architect, Charles Tharinger, an accomplished residential architect of local importance who received numerous commissions from the city's wealthiest residents. - The largest concentration of Tharinger 1 s domestic work can be seen in the North Point area on Milwaukee's upper east side. He showed great depth of design expertise by employing Craftsman, Colonial Revival and Elizabethan styles in his work. In addition to the Dahinden House, he designed several smaller scale residences on the West Side that are mostly in the Craftsman Style. Compared to all his known work, the Dahinden House ranks as Tharinger's best residential design. In the context of Bungalow style houses in Milwaukee, there are few others in the city that are of this scale and exhibit such a high level of craftsmanship and materials. The bungalow was widely built during the first two decades of the twentieth as tract housing in Milwaukee, but few big budget bungalow style houses were built and few of these can compare with the Dahinden House in quality or design clarity.