House
This stately brownstone Italianate villa was completed in 1860 as a summer home for hotelier Ruggles Sylvester Morse. Morse had left Maine to make his fortune in hotels in New York, Boston and New Orleans. The house was designed by the New Haven architect Henry Austin. Its distinctive asymmetric form includes a four-story tower, overhanging eaves, verandas, and ornate windows. Frescoes and trompe l’oeil wall decorations were created by the artist and decorator Giuseppe Guidicini.
The building is recognized as one of the finest and least-altered examples of a large Italianate Villa-styled brick and brownstone town house in the United States. Gustave Herter created the interiors in a range of styles; this house is his earliest known and only intact commission. More than ninety percent of the original contents survive, including Herter furniture, elaborate wall paintings, artworks, carpets, gas lighting fixtures, stained glass, porcelain, silver, and glassware. The house has twin sinks in the guest bedroom on the second floor, a Turkish smoking room, carved marble fireplaces and a flying staircase. Morse had features incorporated into the house familiar to him from his luxury hotels including the soaring entryway and wall-to-wall carpeting. In its supporting technology, the house was remarkably advanced for the time, with central heating, gas lighting, hot and cold running water, and a servant call system. The water was provided by gutters directing rain water into an enormous tank on the third floor.
Ruggles Morse died in 1893. In 1894, the house and its contents were sold to Joseph Ralph Libby, a Portland merchant. The Libby family occupied the house for over thirty more years, without making significant changes to it.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Mansion
Famous quotes containing the word house:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”
—Jules Henri Poincare (1854–1912)
“In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in John, 14:2.