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:
“They are all gone away,
The house is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
“I came on a great house in the middle of the night
Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through;
And when I pay attention I must out and walk
Among the dogs and horses that understand my talk.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)