Waterman studied for eight years under Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram and worked at Colonial Williamsburg during its creation around 1930, playing a crucial role in the design of its major public buildings. His friend, museum director Fiske Kimball, recommended him to Henry Francis du Pont in 1932, and thereafter Waterman was closely involved with the design of Winterthur. With Winterthur slated to become a museum, Henry Francis du Pont converted its bedrooms and bathrooms to display spaces and moved into the Cottage. (Du Pont's life thus came full circle, as he and his father had lived in a predecessor dwelling of 1838 on the Cottage site while Winterthur was enlarged exactly a half-century before.) Waterman's twelfth and final private house commission, this plain stuccoed box with twin Regency-style curved bays facing a creek was completed the year of the architect's premature death at age fifty-one. As historian Margaret Lidz points out, half of the building was servant space, there being eighteen servants and drivers on staff as late as the 1960s.