Oilman and racehorse enthusiast Fred Turner and his wife, Juliette Miller, hired Korn of Dallas to design a grand, two-story 11,250-square-foot brick country house, with an additional 2,910 square feet of stables and garages. This complex occupies an entire city block in Midland’s West End Addition. The house is Korn’s distinctly 1930s interpretation of the picturesque manorial genre. It consists of a sequence of gable-roofed units faced with a mixed blend of red and black tapestry brick: a central, two-story, side-gabled block framed between end chimneys, a projecting one-story, front-gabled east wing, and a side-gabled west wing that steps down from two stories to one. The front door is framed with a classical stone architrave, and windows are distributed asymmetrically to indicate internal spatial differences.
The property has been leased to the Museum of the Southwest, Midland’s art museum, since 1968. Frank Welch Associates enclosed the south garden porch in 1970, and in 1986, Ford, Powell and Carson designed a low, 15,600-square-foot addition using similar brick but in a modern idiom, connected to the main house by a glass-walled link.