Henderson House, Northeastern University (Edward Pierce House)

Symbolic of the large estates built in Weston from the 1890s through the 1920s, the two-and-a-half-story Edward Pierce House was the last and grandest of these establishments constructed before the Great Depression. An expansive Tudor Revival design, the house dominates its dramatic hilltop site with a stone first story surmounted by stucco and half-timbered upper levels ending in a slate hipped roof. An earlier and similar house (1901–1902) had been constructed here for Arthur Winship Clapp, treasurer of the E. H. Clapp Rubber Company. Edward Pierce, a successful wool merchant, purchased that house in 1909 and expanded the 85-acre estate into 323 acres in Weston and Wellesley, adding agricultural buildings by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. When the original house burned in 1925, Pierce hired the Shepley successor firm to rebuild it in a similar manner.

In 1960, 300 acres of the estate were sold for subdivision into large wooded lots on winding roads. The following year, Northeastern University trustee Ernest Henderson bought the mansion for the university, which remolded it as a conference center. The Edward Pierce House established an image that contemporary homebuilders still attempt to emulate in Weston, albeit often on lots too modest for their overblown scale.