Ornate details make this standard house a jewel
The details on this house are fun to look at!
The boards above the bay window not only end in points, but the triangles are accentuated with dots and the cutouts above the decorative ribbon.
The house itself is a standard 19th century box with its gable turned toward the street, entrance on the side, with one front room and windows balanced above - the design one expects to find on a narrow urban lot. A skilled craftsman probably lived here: Marblehead Street is a short walk from the mills along the Merrimack. But on this ordinary shape, the builder nailed a marvelous melding of details from the popular styles of the Victorian era.
Start with the frieze at the bay window. It looks like lace. Its style is Eastlake, after Charles Eastlake who wrote books extolling this kind of decoration for furniture. Americans moved his designs from the inside to the outside of their houses.
The triangles are repeated on the shingles on the edge of the second story band, but the vertical boards above come from the Stick Style, a style which showed the frame of the house on the outside. The horizontal banding that continues around the sides of the house is typical Stick Style as are the panels below the windows (not visible here).
The corner boards have a piece at the edge carved to imitate rope, a detail often labeled Italianate.
The small hip roof over the gable was meant to suggest thatched roofs on English cottages or those of Swiss chalets.
That emphasis at the eaves, the hip of the roof combined with the verge board curving down to rest on two sets of brackets give a sheltering feeling to the roof, the sense of a cottage, not a city dwelling.
This house was not copied from a pattern book, but designed by the people who were to live here and the builder, assembling the pieces they liked to create their own style.
This self-confidence expressed in construction is one of the pleasures of Victorian houses.
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