These two are no longer extant, although Stowe’s later Nook Farm home, also in the Gothic Revival style, survives and is open to the public as the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. Jordan also designed houses for Mary Beecher Perkins and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the latter being a mansion known as Oakholm. Although significantly altered over the years, this brick house still displays the distinctive features of the Gothic Revival and it had an influence on others built later in the neighborhood. The earliest was the home of Isabella Beecher Hooker (Fig. A number of such homes were built there in the 1850s and 60s, including three houses designed by Octavius Jordan for three sisters from the famous Beecher family. A former farm, at the time it retained a park-like landscape, suitable for Downing-influenced Gothic Villas. In the mid-nineteenth century, the neighborhood of Nook Farm, then on the western edge of Hartford’s expansion, was developed as an affluent neighborhood. Other examples of Gothic Villas in Connecticut include the Duane Barnes House in Middletown, the Charles Green House (designed by Davis himself) in South Windsor, and the elaborate Raynham in New Haven, which was an earlier built house significantly altered in the Gothic Revival style in the 1850s. Typical features of the style include steeply pitched roofs and steep cross gables with decorate bargoards (also called vergeboards), either square windows with drip molds or Gothic-shaped windows, frequently having a pointed arch (or lancet) shape, and bay and oriel windows. With its dramatic pink color and the board-and-batten siding typical of such homes, Roseland is frequently referenced as an exemplar of the Gothic Revival, or Carpenter Gothic, style. This house was intended as a country retreat in the hometown of its owner, who had become wealthy in New York City. 1), built in 1846 in Woodstock, which closely resembles the models that appeared in Downing’s books (Fig. These early models were conceived as country villa residences and Downing, a landscape designer, was imagining picturesque cottages placed within an English pastoral landscape.Ĭonnecticut has one of the great examples of Downing’s ideas in the form of Roseland Cottage (Fig. Influenced by the contemporary English picturesque movement, these designs were popularized in America by the books of Andrew Jackson Downing, which featured designs by his friend, the architect Alexander Jackson Davis. The first two Picturesque styles to appear were the Gothic Revival and Italianate. Emphasizing irregularity in their floor plans and a variety of decorative motifs derived from medieval sources, these kinds of houses would predominate to the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, a new type of house design, referred to as Picturesque or Romantic, took hold. In the 1840s and 1850s, a reaction began against the earlier architectural styles, like the Greek Revival, which had looked back to Classical models.
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