Baldwin House

Generally throughout Iowa, dwellings of the Prairie school tended to be built by individuals living and working within the towns and cities. In the case of the C. B. Baldwin house, designed by G. M. Kernes and built in 1920, the Prairie image was used for a farm dwelling. But the Baldwin house is no ordinary farmhouse in size and appointments, or in image. The architect of this good-sized two-story house looked to the more formal and monumental Prairie style associated with the work of George W. Maher of Chicago. Like much of Maher's work, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow house (1893) in River Forest, Illinois, the Baldwin house is a large rectangular volume covered by a steeply pitched hipped roof covered with red tile and equipped with extended overhanging eaves. Dark red-brown brick is carried up the walls to the sills of the banded second-floor casement windows; then a lighter-colored brick fills in between the windows and is terminated by a thin horizontal band of cast stone. At the center of the entrance front is a porch supported by a pair of brick piers, and a similar living porch projects from the left side of the house.