House

On such a busy corner it is surprising to come across a superb Neo-Colonial house—again one wants to say, among the best in the state. A sharp-edged, crisply folded gambrel roof presents its gable end to the street as a deep overhang. Off center under extravagant serpentine brackets, the entrance, farther inset on a stepped platform, provides a handsomely sidelighted and fanlighted door with a generosity of width and window never found in the colonial period. The compositional tension that results from the centered/off-center adjustment of the door to its attached window bay above is worthy of postmodernist Neo-Neo-Colonial examples. A row of ornamented dormers pokes through the gambrel on the side elevation, beneath which a very deep porch—one of those cool, shadowy summer rooms of which no colonial ever dreamed—projects on Ionic columns toward the garden. The delicacy and precision of ornament and moldings throughout complete this delightful colonial romance read through Queen Anne–tinted glasses. But who is responsible?