The Dead Architects Society

In Santa Barbara, Calif., the hot architect in town is George Washington Smith. In Charlottesville, Va., it's Eugene Bradbury. And in the small town of Washington, Conn., homes by Ehrick Rossiter are prized. These architects have a few things in common: They're long dead, they're relatively unknown outside the small, affluent pockets where they practiced in the early 20th century and they've all made a comeback.

Revival-Style Architecture

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Julie Soefer for The Wall Street Journal

In 2010, Calvin and Jill Schlenker bought this 10,000 square foot, five-bedroom, 3� bathroom neo-Georgian home designed by John Staub in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston. Shown here is Mrs. Schlenker.

Prospective buyers now ask real-estate agents for these architects by name, and are willing to pay a premium for their houses. Their homes are being restored instead of remodeled or torn down. Owners of the estates designed by these architects are forming societies, gathering fans to hear lectures and mining local archives for original drawings and photographs. There are new books, exhibits and even films about their work. Living architects are copying their designs.

Using a name-brand architect has always been partly about bragging rights and partly about coveting superior taste, says Wayne Craven, an art-history professor at the University of Delaware and author of "Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society." "Architecture is the most potent symbol of having arrived in this country," he says.

The rise of these architects reflects a resurgence in interest in an original source of traditional architecture�as opposed to the newer "McMansion" variety�as well as a desire by some owners to connect to where they live by preserving a symbol of local pride. "These houses are a way to establish a commitment to the community," says Mosette Broderick, director of the Urban Design and Architecture Studies program at New York University.

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Virginia: This Bradbury-designed house sold for $4 million in 2010, making it one of the most expensive houses sold in the city that year.

In the Santa Barbara area, Bob Truskowski, a landscape architect, was so smitten with the work of Mr. Smith that he searched for one of the architect's homes for eight years, finally buying one in near-original condition near Montecito in 2009 for $2.5 million. In 2007, Ellen DeGeneres sold a George Washington Smith house to Google's Eric Schmidt for $20 million.

"There's definitely cachet," Mr. Truskowski says of Mr. Smith, who is known for pioneering the Spanish Colonial Revival style in the region in the 1920s. Mr. Truskowski and his wife, Maureen Gallen, spent more than $500,000 restoring the home, a project that has taken 2� years and has included painting and restoration, a new roof and infrastructure work. They have framed copies of the original plans, which they got from prior owners, and have worked to keep the house as it would have looked a hundred years ago, even using the original door keys they found in a barrel in the basement. In March, the couple will host the next meeting of the town's George Washington Smith Society, a social group made up of owners of homes designed by the architect.

These rediscovered architects practiced from the late 1800s through the 1930s, a period of unprecedented growth when newly minted barons built enormous mansions in a traditional, classical style. In the following years, through the Great Depression, the rise of suburbs, modernism and the advent of "star" architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, traditional classical style lost favor. The derisory term "McMansion" arose to refer to a traditional, somewhat generic, new home.

Now, newly minted billionaires are buying the originals: In 2010, software billionaire Larry Ellison paid $10.5 million for the Beechwood Mansion, which was restored in 1881 by architect Richard Morris Hunt, in Newport, R.I.; that same year, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim bought the Duke Mansion, designed in 1901 by Alexander Welch, on Fifth Avenue in New York for $44 million.

The pride in local history and subsequent renaissance of a representative architect has an economic effect. "I wish every house was a Rossiter," says Litchfield County, Conn., real-estate agent Stacey Matthews, adding that only one or two of Mr. Rossiter's homes come on the market every few years. The architect designed dozens of massive homes and buildings�some in the Queen Anne style, others in the Colonial Revival style�in Washington, Conn., in the early 1900s; his work has seen a resurgence of interest since the 2007 publication of two books on him that can be found on many local coffee tables.

When Ms. Matthews first took prospective buyers Suzanne and Doug Day to the eight-bedroom, 4,620-square-foot Rossiter-designed Tuscan farmhouse-style home that was for sale, Mr. Day refused to get out of the car. While its original architectural details were intact, the property was overgrown; Ms. Matthews estimated it needed millions of dollars of work. The couple, in contrast, were looking for a "ready-to-go" weekend house. Plus, they didn't connect immediately to the style.

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Fancy Fix-up: Owner Matt Hantzmon extensively restored his Charlottesville, Va., house, which was designed by Eugene Bradbury.

But it was the Rossiter name that eventually swayed them. During their search they read books about the architect, saw other homes he'd designed and learned his role in the town's history. In 2011, Ms. Matthews sold the home to the Days for $1.75 million.

"We decided to take it on," says Ms. Day, who has since embarked on what will be an almost three-year restoration, working from old drawings and photographs to make it as accurate to the original as possible while still adding modern touches. (She declined to say how much the restoration cost.) Their purchase has connected them with other owners of Rossiter houses.

One of those owners was Louise van Tartwijk, who is well known in Washington for her painstakingly historically accurate restoration of a 9,000-square-foot Queen Anne style Rossiter house in the middle of town. Ms. van Tartwijk and her husband Hans, who works for an international real-estate firm, had made it clear they wanted a Rossiter, and the owners of the house approached them. They bought the house in 2008 for $1.8 million and embarked on a 1�-year project costing over $1.5 million.

Staying true to the integrity of a 100-year-old house can be uncomfortable at times. Though she did install heating, Ms. van Tartwijk repaired and reinstalled the original windows, deciding that double panes wouldn't have been authentic�now blankets are needed in a couple of areas of the house. "When you live in a house like this, you deal with it and adapt. When you come into this house, it looks exactly what it would have looked like back in Rossiter's time," says Ms. van Tartwijk, who has submitted the home for a preservation award.

In Charlottesville, Va., a rediscovery of architect Mr. Bradbury�who designed many of the town's most significant buildings as well as more modest homes in the early 20th century�was driven by University of Virginia architectural-history professor Daniel Bluestone. In 2000, Mr. Bluestone bought a house for $575,000 and learned it had been designed by Mr. Bradbury. By examining deeds, insurance maps, drawing collections, city directories, newspapers and obituaries, Mr. Bluestone assembled a list of more than 30 Bradbury homes. Many of the homes are the subject of tours he gives, essays he writes as well as the lectures he gives to audiences that usually include Bradbury homeowners.

It was a postcard invitation to a lecture on Bradbury from Mr. Bluestone that informed Jennifer Ward that the home her parents left her on 2.4 acres was designed by the architect. The discovery contributed to Ms. Ward's decision to turn down a subsequent offer of several million dollars from a developer. "He wouldn't tell us what he was going to do with the house," she says. Ms. Ward says she and her sister were also influenced by a 2007 demolition of a Bradbury that caused nine months of public outrage in the city.

The notoriety from that demolition also helped raise the price of a Bradbury home that sold for $4 million in 2010, real-estate agents say�one of the most expensive houses sold in a city that year. "It's a name that attracts buyers," says real-estate agent Sally Du Bose, who says Bradbury houses don't come up often. The home's price also reflected the effort the prior owners had put into restoring the 7,500-square-foot five bedroom, brick-and-stucco house back to the way it would have looked in Mr. Bradbury's time. The restoration included getting rid of asbestos, redoing all the electrical systems, replacing a boiler, repairing water damage and fixing the roof and repairing and replacing all the slate.

"My experience with Bradbury just about killed me," says former owner Beverly Sidders, who estimates the work cost around $3 million. The time, effort and money spent "cost me my marriage."

Not all Gilded Age mansions need such extensive work. When Robert Lieff, an attorney, and his wife, Gretchen, bought a seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom, 10,500-square-foot George Washington Smith house in Montecito for $10.5 million in July, they found they really didn't have to change much. The kitchen had been redone already, and the rest of the rooms were spacious and well-lit. So the Lieffs focused on the home's gardens and its history, getting the original drawings and correspondences between the architect and his clients and consulting with local architect Marc Appleton, who wrote "George Washington Smith: An Architect's Scrapbook" in 2001.

During the research process, Ms. Lieff discovered the important role played in the design by Mr. Smith's collaborator, Lutah Maria Riggs, one of the first female American architects. Since then, Ms. Lieff has started a Lutah Maria Riggs Society for owners of homes designed by the architect to gather to discuss her work. She's also participating in a coming exhibit and a film about Ms. Riggs.

A similar group of homeowners has coalesced around John Staub, a Houston architect who was known for glamorous yet at the same time understated, traditional mansions in a wide range of styles. After the 2007 publication of "The Country Houses of John F. Staub," by Stephen Fox, an architectural historian and a lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture, momentum gained to save Staub homes that were being torn down, particularly in the affluent River Oaks neighborhood.

"Suddenly people became more aware of Staub's name," says Kelley Trammell, who started a preservation group to help people designate their homes as landmarks, allowing them to claim tax credits as long as they don't renovate the exteriors.

"I felt like the house was a good investment because it was a Staub," says Calvin Schlenker, a commodities trader. According to public records, he and his wife paid $6.3 million in 2010 for a 1930s neo-Georgian designed by Mr. Staub that had subsequently gained a 3,500-square-foot pool pavilion with 30-foot ceilings modeled after Claridge's, the hotel in London. During their hunt, Mr. Schlenker and his wife became "more and more convinced" they wanted a Staub. "There's a very limited inventory, they don't come on the market very often and there's great demand," he says. Since neither he nor his wife are Houston natives, Mr. Schlenker says the house made them feel much more ingrained in the city and the neighborhood.

Houston real-estate agent Janie Miller says Staub homes have more of a premium than ever. "You pay so much more it isn't funny. It's like buying a diamond from Tiffany's."

Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com