Clapboarding, patterned shingling, half timbering, pebble dash, and panel brickwork finish the highly textured exterior of this Queen Anne house with its complex composition and unusual corner windows. Despite its modest size, the local newspaper in that year commented that it was surpassed by none in Coldwater “in solidity, in warmth, in convenience or in substantial elegance.” John T. Starr (1861–1908), a hardware merchant and real estate speculator, built the house. East Chicago Street was the site of one of Coldwater's early Chicago Road taverns, a stop for travelers, emigrants, and land hunters. The street began to acquire an elegant character even before the Civil War and it is now one of southern Michigan's best residential streetscapes of the 1860 to 1910 period.