'Evergreen on the Falls' the Albert H. Carroll House, Baltimore, MD

The Albert H. Caroll House, Baltimore, MD. 1860 Photo: Wikimedia

'Evergreen' was built by the owner of a cotton mill, Albert H. Carroll, in 1860, following an irregular plan, but an idiosyncratic design. The house does not have a tower, nor, like many tower-less irregular plans, does it suggest a tower with a cupola, fenestration, or the placement of the entrance in the center. Rather, this house places the entrance on the projecting pavilion. While the façade is painted brick, the windows have no surrounds, but the emphasis is placed on a series of elaborate wooden awnings that project further than any typical wooden awning. The entablature is nonexistent, with the s scroll brackets projecting right from the façade without any framing. The projecting pavilion has the main entrance, a triple arched palladian design; above, the window is a normal palladian design, but oddly the central window is especially long with the sides placed high up, a very unclassical formula. This is topped by a wooden awning with an engaged rounded pediment in the center and very elongated c and s scroll brackets. On the recessed façade, a double window on the first floor with a wooden awning with a tent roof design sits underneath a single window. The simple side façade has a spare bay window with a round window in the gable. A unique house, unfortunately much of it was destroyed by a fire in 1970, but it was well restored by the Maryland SPCA.

'Orianda' the Thomas Winans House, Baltimore, MD

The Thomas Winans House, Baltimore, MD. 1856

Photo: Wikimedia

The Thomas Winans house is another one of these Russian themed estates of the 1850s. Winans' father was an inventor who worked on the construction of the Russian railroad, like Harrison in Philadelphia. He named his estate Crimea, after the peninsula in the Ukraine, and his house Orianda, after a Greek revival palace in the Crimea designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel as one of his commissions for the Greek royal family (never built). The house has a five bay plan (the entrance is to the right of the above photo) with a porch around the door matching the porches to the sides and to the rear. The house, like other country houses around Baltimore, is finished in fieldstone with stone molded window lintels and simple decoration. The porch is quite attractive, with a lattice railing and ogee spandrel brackets. A cupola tops the whole almost entirely glass with a pointed roof. The house has no brackets, but instead uniquely features very strange thick gothic finials hanging down from the large eave at the corners of the house and cupola. This is a highly individualistic feature that rarely appears. It currently sits in the middle of a large park on a dramatic bluff overlooking a valley and is a museum and event facility (more images there).

'Tivoli' the Enoch Pratt House, Baltimore, MD

The Enoch Pratt House, Baltimore, MD. 1855 Photo: Wikimedia

'Tivoli' was constructed as the summer house of Enoch Pratt, one of Baltimore's major philanthropists and businessmen, in 1855. The house is a hulking mass, a three story, five bay plan of fieldstone and wood. The house has a string course that separates the second from the third floor. The window treatment is standard on the house, with a simple wooden surround and a molding above. Oddly, the house doesn't have an entrance porch, which I suspect was once there and similar to the back Tuscan porch, but has an entablature resting on brackets. The main entablature has c scroll brackets and is simple, akin to other country houses like 'The Mount'. It's here the house is particularly interesting. While on the front, an angular engaged pediment and arched window emphasize the center of the house, the side takes a different tack, dividing the façade into two main bays with stacked box windows with triple arched windows and panels above. These are topped by two engaged round pediments framing arched windows, contrasting with the angular front. A side service wing to the left offers a different scale, emphasizing its subordination to the main block. It is now the administration building of a mental hospital, finding new life like many of Baltimore's country houses, as an institution.

'The Mount' the James Carey Jr. House, Baltimore, MD

The James Carey Jr. House, Baltimore, MD. 1858 Photo: Doug Copeland

Baltimore had some impressive country estates surrounding it, such as 'The Mount' built for a Quaker businessman and philanthropist, John Carey Jr in 1858 by William H. Reasin, a local architect. The house is supposed to be renovated soon, but seems to have caught on fire. Fortunately it was saved from destruction but remains vulnerable. The house is beautifully proportioned, with a five bay plan and a fieldstone façade with quoins; the windows have simple stone lintels. The central bay projects from the façade grandly, with an thick arch at the base a stone stringcourse and two arched windows above; basically there are three arches each diminishing with each floor. A row of bricks diagonally set into the sides of the projection where the stringcourse ends, indicates there was a porch once, now gone. The simple entablature has double s scroll brackets (with very shallow curves) and the whole is topped by a fine centered cupola with a broad eave and nicely framed triple arched windows. The house's massing and simple design makes it a beautifully simple villa. Hopefully, the house will be restored soon!

'Clifton' the Johns Hopkins House, Baltimore, MD

'Clifton' the Johns Hopkins House, Baltimore, MD. 1858 

Photo: Doug Copeland

Photo: Wikimedia

'Clifton' is another remodel of an earlier house, a five bay home built in the Federal style in 1803 for Henry Thompson. In 1838, it was bought by Johns Hopkins, the same university benefactor, and was remodeled in 1858 to its current Anglo-Italianate design by Niernsee and Neilson, a firm whose Baltimore work I have previously explored. The house has a five bay plan inherited from its previous incarnation, but the wings and tower placement are very unprecedented. Unlike Locust Grove, Niernsee did not disguise the original house, seen as the tall central block here, but rather expanded it drastically, making it the centerpiece of a much larger Italianate composition, adding Anglo-Italianate surrounds to the windows, a small entablature sequestering the third floor, and an entablature-less cornice with simple beam brackets. A broad porch was built linking the entire design and wing (an unexpectedly large porch!) with simple arches with bulls eyes in the spandrels resting on chamfered, paneled pillars. The bulkiness of the porch is relieved by a rather delicate railings with Roman-style crosses tied with bulls eyes. A simple beam bracket cornice completes the design with a pediment indicating the front entrance. The house gets very Italianate in its tower, connected by a wing with double tombstone windows with no surrounds. The tower covers a port cochere and seems to combine the full gamut of tower motifs with an arched window on the second stage, a Renaissance surround rectangular window on the third (with Renaissance balconies), a Romanesque series of drops that underlie a simple dentilled string course, an uncommon fourth stage with three deep panels and a window in the center, and on the fifth a triple arched window with an iron balcony surrounding the whole. This might be one of the tallest Italianate towers I have featured. The rear of the house has a polygonal bay and a very strange broad eave with c scroll brackets that fill almost the whole second floor, perhaps the most exaggerated brackets I have seen.

A blog post shows detailed shots of the house and the interior during renovation, with great images of the stunning plasterwork, fine stenciled walls, and unique woodwork. The design of the tower, semi detached and connected by a low wing suggests strongly to me Osborne House, one of the UK's premier Italianate palaces:

Photo: Wikimedia

'Locust Grove' the Samuel F. B. Morse House, Poughkeepsie, NY

'Locust Grove' the Samuel F. B. Morse House, Poughkeepsie, NY. 1850

Photo: Wikimedia

Photo: Wikimedia

Photo: Wikimedia

Thinking of remodels into the Italianate style, the Samuel F. B. Morse house, Locust Grove, originally a 1771 five bay house, was remodeled extensively by the famous painter and telegraph developer (think Morse code) to the designs by Alexander Jackson Davis, America's premier Italianate designer of the period. The house, especially in its large arches, finish, and tower proportions very much resembles John Notman's Riverside in NJ. Davis successfully disguised the five bay house so that it is difficult to imagine what it originally looked like today, and because it was a remodel, the house does not follow any regular plan but is a custom design. The five bay façade, with the exception of the two outermost bays was completely hidden behind a massive projecting pavilion that covered the three central bays and entrance and sheltered a port cochere. This pavilion featured a large arched entrance in the center with a palladian window above. On the right side, Davis extended the façade with a polygonal bay framed by a large porch with thin, iron lattice supports. The left bay was originally supposed to be polygonal as well, but something seems to have changed in the design. Davis placed the tower to the rear, overlooking the Hudson, but aligned it so that it is centered on the projecting pavilion, making it look like a cupola from the front, a central tower design from the back. The whole façade is flushboarded with simple details reflecting its early period, a plain entablature board with c scroll brackets on the house (beam brackets on the porch). The window surrounds are complete moldings. The paint scheme for this house is certainly one of the most historically accurate, reflecting the pale colors favored by Downing and Davis. The house is now a museum.

The Clark J. Whitney House, Detroit MI

The Clark J. Whitney House, Detroit MI. 1857 Photo: Scott Weir

The same house in 1882. Photo: Scott Weir

It's rare to see an Italianate remodeled into another Italianate. Typically you slap a mansard roof on top or a Queen Anne gable and call it a day. But that's not what Whitney did with his chaste 1857 house in Detroit. Instead, he took his genteel Italianate and decided to display his new status with a zany new design, doubling the size and basically constructing a new house right into the fabric of the old. The house has a rotated side tower plan. In the 1857 design, the house had a projecting bay with two windows and a typical three stage tower, all ensconced in a lovely arched porch topped by a railing with a guilloche design. The window treatments were simple, with rectangular windows that had rococo iron designs as the hood moldings on the second floor and arched windows on the first floor and tower. The cornice design featured a thick architrave molding with double s scroll brackets (Detroit couldn't get enough of those) all very closely spaced. All in all it was a nice house reflecting the taste of the 50s.

When 1882 rolled around, Whitney had made some money. He was a major purveyor of Detroit's music scene, selling instruments and sheet music. In 1882, he helped rebuild the old opera that had burned and really came into his own. No doubt, the rebuilding of the opera (in a rather refined modern French design) caused him to think about updating his own home. To the fabric of the old house, Whitney started by removing the wrapping porch, replacing the porch on the front two windows with a bracket surround supporting a balcony with a series of segmental arches and hanging drops, a very picturesque touch. Around the door, a rich and complex two story porch was built. The rectangular windows were disguised by segmental arched stone surrounds (oddly, an incised angular line runs through the arch). The center of the entablature on the projecting pavilion was cut (after new c scroll brackets were installed), the roof was raised, and a dormer was added with a segmental arched open pediment. Although the old decoration of the tower was retained, the eave was removed and a new story was attached with a triple arched palladian window, no doubt to compensate for the poor optics of a stubby tower with a steeper roof slope. A rather bizarre and heavy finial crowned the whole. The most drastic change, however, was the addition of basically a second house to the side, designed in the pavilion plan. Unlike the old house, where the windows were only disguised as segmental arched, here they were actually so, and were connected by a string course of stone that distinguished the older from the newer section. The new wing was all about diagonals, with two two story bay windows flanking an equally diagonal lacy porch. One odd feature is the bracket placement on the diagonals of the bay windows, with few brackets there contrasting with the forest in the other sections. 

So, which do you prefer? 1857 or 1882? I'd love to know!

With this, I end my short series on Lost Italianates of Detroit, but will revisit the topic soon.

The Thomas W. Palmer House, Detroit, MI

The Thomas W. Palmer House, Detroit MI. 1864-74 Photo: Scott Weir

Potentially one of the most intriguing houses of Detroit, it was built between 1864 and 1874 for one of the most important senators in Michigan history, Thomas W. Palmer. The house is the product of a variety of remodels, continued throughout a decade, and thus there is no single date for its construction. The house as it stood after the remodels was a pavilion plan house with a central tower, but it started off as a simple Federal or Greek Revival farmhouse, which survives in the right hand pavilion of the central block. That is why the house's pavilions are actually asymmetrical, with the right hand pavilion being taller and thinner than the left. It doesn't follow the typical pavilion plan. The left hand pavilion features paired rectangular windows joined by a rather baroque pediment on brackets. The right hand pavilion has a triple arched palladian also topped by a curving baroque pediment (the sort of baroque styling seems to have been a favorite in Detroit). Both have c scroll brackets, paired, with tiny thin brackets in between pairs. The central tower has double tombstone windows (they looked painted), a round window, and a broad arch that outlines the whole. The tower has s scroll brackets, but of a rather strange type, with very strong curves and an elaborate trefoil shape at the top; a Gothic quatrefoil balustrade and partial roof top the whole. The porch, unlike a typical pavilion plan stretches around the right hand pavilion, with a triple arched palladian entrance in the center and ogee brackets.

The side of the house looks to be from a later phase and features a second, taller tower, somewhat plain with a basket handle arch outline with small Romanesque drops. Oddly, the squat tower is topped with a cupola with a tent roof. Note the ladder that provides access to this tower angled on the roof! A final side wing seems to be of the latter phase with segmental arched windows and a small entablature. While not necessarily a harmonious plan, and even though it feels somewhat imbalanced like a slope to the right, the house is very picturesque in the finest tradition of individualistic Italianate conceptions. It was demolished to provide a home for the current Detroit Institute of Arts.

The H. R. Newberry House, Detroit, MI

The H. R. Newberry House, Detroit, MI. 1875 Photo: Scott Weir

And now for something totally different than the Detroit symmetrical plan, the H. R. Newberry house, built by a railroad executive in 1875, presents us with a very different design concept. Following the rotated side hall plan, the Newberry house has such bulk and verticality, rising all across to a full three stories, it almost looks like an apartment building. It seems that there are two different building phases here, given the disparity of elements, with the left three bays being different than the others and apparently an addition of the 1880s. The house features a typical 1870s style for the region, with brick and stone accents dividing the surface into bands and Eastlake incised designs. The first floor windows are simple rectangles, while the second floor features windows with convex fillets in the corners, and the third floor has segmental arched windows with convex fillets, with each stage become more complex geometrically. This is topped by an entablature with very shallow angular brackets and a row of dentils. A small engaged pediment characterizes the right hand bay while a more elaborate broken pediment with spiral ends characterizes the left; this is a particular favorite design in Queen Anne architecture. The tower features brick panels and pilasters and a hefty palladian window, a rather ponderous design that looks more like a castle or Renaissance tower. The cornice is broken three times, with an engaged triangular pediment flanked by two engaged rounded pediments, a rather elaborate, almost baroque touch. The porch as well is particularly lovely (note the cute balcony at the corner to the right. The first stage has horseshoe arches on thin banded columns, but above is an exquisite glassed conservatory with a series of alternating thick and thin arched windows, a triangular pediment on the front, arched on the sides, and to top it all a cut out Vitruvian scroll and anthemion, providing a nicely frilly contrast to the house's bulk. Note as well the delicate iron fence of rinceaux.