'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).