100 year old Haverhill house has classic Shingle Style design
The Highlands of Haverhill is a neighborhood of marvelous houses. This house at 125 Arlington Street, is understated and small, compared to its neighbors, but well worth looking at.
When it was built in 1891, the Shingle Style - the extensive use of shingles to sheath walls and roof - was fashionable. Many architects simply added pieces of this style to a basic house, a shingled turret, a bowed window, a curved dormer, to please the homeowner. The architect of this house, however, understood the idea behind the Shingle Style: shingles, because they are nailed in place little piece by little piece, can cover a curved surface as a flat board - a clapboard, for example - cannot.
This house IS a curved surface, a round tower. And the design is so simple, the lines so smooth, that without its Victorian brackets, its small paned windows, it would look decidedly modern.
Everything reinforces the tower. The stone porch below supports it, heavy enough visually to carry the mass of the tower. The small windows hardly break the surface of the curve; the larger ones are set in a bay attached to the outside. The roof, a cone ending in a finial(not visible here) completes the shape. The wings and wooden porch give human scale. Without them the tower would be quite austere and forbidding.
The owner, Enoch Howes, was one of the partners of Woodman and Howes, shoe manufacturers. He moved from a classic Carpenter Gothic cottage in the center of town to the classic Shingle Style home in the Highlands.
The Haverhill Historical Society has portraits of him in his youth and later as a patriarch.
No comments:
Post a Comment