The Millar-Wheeler House, Utica, NY

The Millar-Wheeler House, Utica, NY. 1866

Photo: Wikimedia

The Millar-Wheeler house is a spectacular Italianate on Genesee Street in Utica built in 1866. Following the increasing trend for elaboration found in the 1860s and 1870s, the house displays an interesting combination of complex ornament and simplicity in wall treatment. The house is a symmetrical plan Italianate, but it verges on the central tower plan because the cupola has been pushed to the front of the house and simulates a tower because the central bay slightly projects. The treatment of the windows is simple, with plain window molding surrounds topped by pediments.

The real treat on this house is the carpentry. The porch construction is particularly eye-catching. The porch itself around the arched door features not only paneled columns, but an elaborate dentilled and bracketed cornice, and an interesting open arch spanning the interior of the porch arches. Above is a five bay, half octagonal, sengmental arched window that shows the same elaborate ornament. In all cases, the design features turnings and cut out designs (fleur de lys, cartouches, quatrefoils) that create the built-up, carved look seen on a lot of houses in the 60s. The cupola itself continues the elaborate design with tombstone windows, Corinthian pilasters, and thick brackets. Small embedded pediments are on each side of the tower cornice. The main cornice of the house, which has s curve brackets, is of the horizontal type but there is an interesting feature where the third floor windows that are in the entablature are flanked by brackets and have a free floating fringe hanging over them, like a truncated wooden awning. There is also a simple side porch on the left hand facade. The house is currently a bed and breakfast called Rosemont Inn, and pictures of some of the interior can be found here.

'Fountain Elms' the James and Helen Williams House, Utica, NY

'Fountain Elms', Utica, NY. 1852 Photo: Wikimedia

Following Photos: mrsmecomber

'Fountain Elms' is a fine house on Utica's Genesee Street, a major thoroughfare. Built for Helen and James Williams in 1852 by architect William Woollett it is currently a museum space for the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute. Because the Williams planned to make the house a museum space, the interiors (created in a much higher style than the house featured originally) and exterior are well preserved and feature an exceptional collection of mid-19th century furniture and artwork. As with the other houses of the 1850s I have been exploring, it is severe in its design, but it employs an uncommon plan, the pavilioned plan with two symmetrical projecting pavilions connecting a central entrance bay. The pavilion design seems to be reflected on the right side of the house as well, where two bays strongly project at the ends (pictured below).

Interesting features of the house include thick brownstone moldings around the windows, fine rafter brackets typical of early Italianates, and blind arches (even in the chimneys). The thickness of the moldings on the second floor round headed windows gives the house a top-heavy appearance because of the simplicity of the bracket and cornices on the first floor windows. The Palladian window in the center is uncommon, but particularly unique is the Palladian configuration of the door with detached side lights. The porch and balustrades are dignified and Renaissance-inspired. Finally, the color scheme of this house is particularly historical and well conceived. Here, the stucco is painted yellow, while the trim is all a uniform brown to simulate the brownstone of the moldings. This house allows us to consider the effect of using simple and historically correct colors for an Italianate house.

Photo: Mike Christoferson

'Mount Holly', the Charles Dudley House, Foote, MS

'Mount Holly', Foote, MS. 1856 Photos: Joseph

'Mount Holly' is a plantation house is central Mississippi built in 1856 for Charles Dudley. It was designed by either Samuel Sloan or Calvert Vaux, two of the most important Italianate architects practicing in the mid 19th century. Calvert Vaux is a strong contender, since the house closely resembles one of his published plans. Only an architect's intervention could explain the defining odd feature of the house, the fact that it conforms roughly to the irregular plan, but it lacks two of the most important features found on this style. First and most obvious, there is no tower. Rather the place where the tower should rise is a strongly projecting, gabled bay. Second, is the fact that the 'tower' element projects further than the left hand section that should extend the furthest. The emphasis has been entirely shifted to the center of the house, even though it is clearly irregular because of the strong recess on the right wing and the projection of the left wing.

Ornamentally, the house is as spare as they come. There are no window moldings, just paired tombstone windows. The brackets are paired as well, simple, and united by a architrave molding. Even the porches are simple, consisting of plain arches and square columns. The house was almost certainly stuccoed in some pastel beige. However, playfulness appears in the central door. It is recessed in a portico that is triple arched Palladian in form with an elaborate cornice, large, acanthus leaf brackets, and small brackets. This is a surprisingly high-style porch on a house that doesn't have a lot of ornament, and it relieves the simplicity of the facade. The chimneys as well have toothed and paneled brickwork. The house is currently abandoned by its owner and was listed in 2011 as one of Mississippi's most endangered places. The plan below is taken from one of Clavert Vaux' drawings on which the house seems to have been based and perhaps shows how the interior is arranged.

NOTE: This house burned down June 17, 2015

Photo: HABS

The James Bishop House, New Brunswick, NJ

The James Bishop House, New Brunswick, NJ. 1852 Photos: Wikimedia

Black and White photos: HABS

The James Bishop house is a uniquely eclectic Italianate home in New Brunswick, NJ, a city which has been robbed of most of its history because of a vast and poorly considered plan of urban renewal. Thus, the Bishop house is a lucky survivor thanks to Rutgers University, which uses it as classroom space currently. It was built in 1852 by architect Isaiah Rolfe for James Bishop, an important congressman from New Jersey,in a fascinating mixture of Italianate and Gothic Revival elements.The house is broadly an example of the side tower plan with a projecting pavilion and tower anchoring a central section (which is truncated here) although to the right there is a wing with a porch that terminates in an octagonal Gothic tower. The whole is stuccoed and finished in a very spare style typical of the 1850s.

Italianate elements of the design include Venetian windows on the first floor of the front of the house and a variety of paired tombstone windows on the upper floors. The triple arched Palladian window in the tower is also very Italianate. The tent roof on the tower is an uncommon but not unprecedented element. Here it is pierced by eyebrow dormer windows. The blind arches in the tower as well can be seen in other examples.

Gothic elements are limited mostly to the decoration. The toothed string-course moldings and the setback in the facade on the pavilion contribute to the castellated feeling the house aims for. The front door is Romanesque in style, with small columns surrounding it, a design found in Romanesque church portals. Particularly important is the function of crenelations. Not only does the octagonal tower have a crenelated parapet, but the brackets one might expect are expressed as a crenelated pattern in the facade. Even the simple porch with its octagonal Gothic columns is crenelated as are the bay windows. A final zany element is the chimneys, the three of which have different patterns and must have been copied from a published image of Medieval design.

The interiors, which have been mostly preserved, are extravagant. A few images seen below show an impressive divides staircase, a library with Italianate shelves and a bizarre inlaid floor, and expensive marble mantlepieces. Although Gothic did not frequently cross over with Italianate design, nonetheless the Bishop house is an important early example of the eclectic experimentation found in early Italianates.

The rear.

'Nuits', the Francois Cottenet House, Irvington, NY

'Nuits', Irvington, NY. 1852 Photos: Wikimedia

'Nuits' is an impressive early Italianate mansion overlooking the Hudson River Valley in Irvington, NY, a city full of impressive homes. It was part of the push in the early and mid 19th century to construct elaborate showplace estates on the river to both take advantage of the impressive views and the company offered by the artists, businessmen, and writers who had country homes in the area. It was designed by the German architect Detlef Lienau for Francois Cottenet, a French immigrant to the US.

The house is a highly unique example of Italianate design, and its plan is complicated and expansive. It is in general an example of the central tower plan with a strongly projecting tower bisecting a narrow three story block. This central block, while it gives the appearance of symmetry soon dissolves from the sides into a mass of asymmetrical projections, bays, and corridors. As can be seen on the plan below, the house is a series of intersecting cubes, which seem placed where they seemed most conducive to interior planning rather than exterior symmetry. Whoever said function followed form in historic design? Indeed, the house does seem like some fantastic cubist sculpture, and must have seemed striking to 19th century steamboat passengers.

Unlike many Italianates, Nuits is actually built of stone. Apparently Cottenet had no problems with importing expensive Caen stone for his house. Decoratively, the house is in line with the severity characteristic of Italianate designs of the 1850s: spare walls and light colors only relieved by porches and around the windows. The entablature is only marked by a slight projection in the stone and rafter brackets. At Nuits, the windows are liberally supplied with Juliette balconies, wooden tent roofed awnings, and even a tent roof box window. The front itself has a few interesting features in that the windows flanking the tower are actually triple segmental arched windows, and the archway surrounding the main door is rusticated (the seams between stone courses are emphasized). Very simple, spindly porches are liberally supplied around the main block. A large conservatory was added in the 1860s, a unique survivor.

The house is still a private home and seems to have had a pool added behind the billiard room. Recent pictures of the front and of one of the interiors can be found online.

'Ridgewood' the Edwin Litchfield House, Brooklyn, NY

'Ridgewood' Brooklyn, NY. 1854-57 Photo: Wikimedia

Photo: Kim

'Ridgewood' also known as 'Litchfield Villa' is perhaps Alexander Jackson Davis' most important and lavish Italianate mansion and bears the distinction of nearly duplicating a house we have looked at before, the Munn house in Utica, NY. Currently surrounded by Prospect Park in Brooklyn, it was built in 1854-57 by Davis for Edwin Litchfield, an extremely important figure in the development of Brooklyn's Park Slope, the Gowanus Canal, and railways. When Propsect Park was laid out, the Litchfields were allowed to keep their home until their deaths in the 1880s, after which the park service occupied the house as offices. After a long period of neglect, the house is in the process of being restored.

The house strongly resembles the Munn house in plan, and Davis seems to have simply expanded the already impressive design he had constructed in Utica a couple years before. A comparison of the facades of these irregular plan houses reveals a variety of differences. First, the placement of the tower and the chamfered projecting pavilion are reversed between the two houses. Unlike the Munn house, there is no recessed archway around the front door. The left hand wing, which once had a similar porch to that on the right, terminates in a surprising round tower with a conical roof. Round towers are exceedingly rare in Italianate houses. The disposition and treatment of windows is mostly the same, except the triple windows of the Munn house on the pavilion are paired arched windows here, and a balcony has been added to the third floor of the pavilion.

Decoratively, the Litchfield house is far more elaborate and more Anglo-Italianate, than the Munn house. The house has rotated s curve brackets typical of Anglo designs, as well as a highly refined acanthus leaf frieze and full classical entablature on the porches and windows. Most startling is the use of corn and wheat capitals instead of the traditional acanthus Corinthian capital, a very uncommon stylistic quirk that was part of the attempt to Americanize classical forms. Although the facade appears to be brick, it was intended to be stuccoed white (the stucco was removed in the 1930s and never restored). Overall, the Litchfields seem to have outdone Davis' earlier designs and created a more sophisticated and playful version that sought to convey a more European sensibility.

The house's interiors are quite stunning. A series of interior pictures can be seen here as well as a period image below. The floors feature beautiful Minton tilework, elaborately carved Rococo Revival fireplaces, pilasters, columns, and an interior rotunda. Finally, the house's interiors are being carefully restored, and one can only hope that someday the stucco may actually be replaced to allow the house its full effect.

Photo: Frank Sinks

Photo: Wikimedia

Parlor.

'Blandwood', the Charles Bland House, Greensboro, NC

Blandwood, Greensboro, NC. 1844

Continuing my exploration of some early Italianate houses, Blandwood in Greensboro is one of the nation's oldest Italianate homes, and it's spare design reflects the simplicity of many early Italianate houses. Begun as an 18th century farmhouse (the four room plan of which can be seen below), the home reached its current design in 1844 under the aegis of none other than Alexander Jackson Davis, the man who introduced Italianate design to America. Davis altered the house for James Moorehead by creating a new wing connected to the original house by a central hall and adding Italianate details, such as the arched entryway, central tower, plaster exterior, and rafter brackets, which are characteristic of most early Italianates. The lack of cornice ornamentation is also typical of an early design. The facade is of the symmetrical and central tower type, and unusual for this kind of design the tower projects dramatically from the facade and is not relieved by side porches. The overall effect is severity at its extreme.

Atypical for an Italianate house, this building lacks the usual play of round and flat headed windows that are usually found in towers. Similarly, the small size of the second floor windows is uncommon. The house also creates a strong sense of formality by the connection of the kitchen and side buildings with segmental arched arcades and simple pilasters. A folly like this is more common in English formal design than American. The interiors are well preserved, since the house was saved from demolition and now operates as a museum. A couple images below, selected from the NCSU page on the house, illustrate the elaborate interiors in their pre-restored state. Blandwood is a rare survivor of a fascinating early page in the history of Italianate design in America. 

Following Photos: NCSU