Swiss Avenue was the exclusive centerpiece of R. S. Munger’s 1905 east side development, the three-hundred-acre Munger Place (DS84). The boulevard was Dallas’s first paved street (using bois d’arc wood blocks), with a trolley line to downtown and a rail line in the alley for those with their own train cars. Controlled by deed restrictions, house designs were required to be of masonry or brick, at least two stories high, and owner-occupied. These houses for the city’s business and professional leaders are in the fashionable styles of the early twentieth century. The red tile hipped roof with broad overhangs and the generous windows give the house (1917, C. P. Sites) at 4937 Swiss a strong Prairie Style flavor. The long horizontal roof, dark brown brick, and vertical chimney slab of the Mabel and Rufus W. Higginbotham House (1913, Lang and Witchell; 5002 Swiss) show strong Wrightian influences, though the house has slightly taller proportions than the Robie House. The firm’s designer, Charles E. Barglebaugh (1881–1927), had worked from 1901 to 1903 in Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio. Next door at 5020 Swiss, Lang and Witchell, but without Barglebaugh, produced an eclectic English country house (1928) with mottled brick and thatch-like roofs for Higginbotham’s son-in-law.
Hal Thomson designed a number of grand Swiss Avenue houses in various styles. His George Aldredge House (1917) at number 5500, though simple in massing under a hipped roof, has an effusion of French Renaissance forms in the central entrance bay. The 1914 house for George Greer House, president of Magnolia Petroleum Company, at 5439 Swiss is English Palladian in dark red brick with contrasting limestone arches, quoins, and lintels.