
Formally more resolved than the Walter Stearns House is a fine, if modest, example in what might be called the pergola mode of the early twentieth century, in which Arts and Crafts interests in revealed structure and in garden design are intermixed. In California this development culminated in such extraordinary examples as the glorified bungalows in shingle and redwood by Greene and Greene. In New England the mode is often at its best in a tighter, more reticent Neo-Colonial format of Doric columns and projecting scroll-sawn bracketing, which is more ornamental than structural, as here in its decorative attachment to the walls. Compositionally, this house is admirably abstract, however unaware its builder probably was of the result. The rectangular, hip-roofed mass of the house is enlivened by