Peter Hotze House

This monumental house was built for businessman Hotze, who had returned to Little Rock after living for nearly thirty years in New York City. The success of his ventures in the northeast is evidenced in the size and elaboration of this house compared with the single-story frame Italianate house (1869) around the corner at 1620 S. Main, where he lived before he went to New York. In style the buff brick two-and-a-half-story house is a blend of classical features and Colonial Revival. The house’s central entrance is fronted by an imposing full-height semicircular portico supported on fluted Ionic columns, and the tall hipped and dormered roof is topped by a widow’s walk. As impressive as is the exterior, the house’s original interiors were even more noteworthy. Green damask laced with metallic gold threads and red cut velvet covered the walls, woodwork throughout was mahogany and oak, and stenciling enriched most ceilings. But the pièce de résistance was the Turkish room, furnished with imported draperies, rugs, and copper and brass decorative items. When Thompson designed this house he was thirty-two years old and only about a dozen years into what would be a fifty-year career in Little Rock.