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58 Griffith, for whom Dilbeck had also built a house on McFarlin Boulevard in the Park Cities. During the 1930s and '40s, Gallup was a hot location for shooting Westerns; the hotel was built as luxury accommodations for the likes of John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and Mae West. The architect even put a stable outside Kirk Douglas' first-floor suite so his horse could be close by. Dilbeck was a master at making buildings look centuries old, long before it was a trend. He often salvaged lumber and brick from the Trinity River bottoms, a dumping ground for demolished buildings during the early half of the 20th Century. If the rescued pieces were misshapen or charred from fire, so much the better. He used a variety of materials on the outside of his houses to make them look like they'd been added to over time, including stucco, brick, stone, and wood shingles. Bricks were laid in slightly wavy patterns to look as if they'd shifted over the centuries; a slurry of stucco made them look rustic. Roofs were made from concrete tiles and heavy shake shingles. Inside, he often paneled walls in pecky cypress because it looked old, and he used weathered, exposed beams to reference ancient French barns. "He designed things to look like they were old and distressed — almost like they might fail," says architect Nancy McCoy of Quimby McCoy. She specializes in preservation architecture, and has restored four Dilbecks, including a sprawling ranch house in Westlake built in 1942 for former Dallas Morning News publisher Ted Dealey. Scott and Kelly Bradley bought the house in the 1970s while Dilbeck was still alive and called the architect out to fix its "sagging" roofline. Dilbeck took a look and said, "That's how I meant it to be." When development encroached on the house, the Bradleys had it dismantled and moved to a safe location. It was McCoy's job not only to reconstruct it, but to build additions that looked as though they were original. "Restoring a Dilbeck is fraught with problems," she says. "He used salvaged materials that are not easy to find. Also, he had his own looseness, a casualness, to his "THERE IS CHARM IN DILBECK'S WORK YOU DON'T FIND IN THE MORE STRAIGHTFORWARD DESIGN OF THE OTHERS." — Historian Willis Winters Dilbeck house on University at Preston Hotel El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico, designed by Dilbeck in 1937. PHOTO COURTESY WILLIS WINTERS. Dilbeck-designed Red Bryan's Smokehouse, circa 1940. Dilbeck-designed Hotel El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico, circa 1937.