History / Architecture
Read the building
The 1981 state survey called this “the most elaborate Chateauesque building in the city” and “the earliest of Lowell’s major late 19th century stone mansions”.[sources] Here is what those words mean, feature by feature, from the street.
- 1The round tower. Full height, conical roof: the signature of the Chateauesque style, borrowed from the Loire. Read more ↓
- 2The porte-cochère. “Coach door”: a roof over the drive so you could step from a carriage to the door under cover. Read more ↓
- 3Tall chimneys. Built of the same dressed stone as the walls; a 2011 count gave nine fireplaces inside. Read more ↓
- 4Cross gables. Steep gables in more than one direction, the front one patterned with a lattice of lozenges. Read more ↓
- 5Rock-faced ashlar. Regular blocks laid in courses, their faces left rough as if just split. Not granite until a record says so. Read more ↓
- 6Carved sandstone panels. Softer stone where carving was wanted — and the plaque that carries the date 1883. Read more ↓
A note on the word “castle”. This is a nineteenth-century house built to look castle-like — the style is named for the châteaux of the Loire, not for fortresses. Nothing here was ever meant to be defended.
Six features
1 The round tower
A full-height round tower with a conical roof anchors the front corner. Towers like this are the signature of the Chateauesque style in America, borrowed from sixteenth-century French country houses. Inside, the tower gives each floor a curved room; one is now a breakfast nook, another a sitting corner.[source]
2 The porte-cochère
French for “coach door”: a roofed structure over the drive so that passengers could step from a carriage to the door under cover. This one is timber on stone piers, with a shallow hipped roof. The survey lists it among the house’s defining features; it still shelters the main entrance.[sources]
3 Tall chimneys
The survey counts “tall chimneys” among the features; a 2011 description of the house gives nine fireplaces. The stacks are built of the same dressed stone as the walls and rise well above the roofline, as the style demands.[sources]
4 Cross gables
Steep gables break the roof in more than one direction. The front gable carries a panel of diaper-patterned stonework (a lattice of lozenges) under its peak — decoration the survey describes as ornamental sandstone work.[source]
5 Rock-faced ashlar
Ashlar means stone cut into regular blocks laid in courses; rock-faced means the outer face is left rough, as if just split, with only the edges dressed smooth. The effect is massive and shadowed. The survey of record calls the stone rock-faced ashlar; it does not call it granite, and neither does this site until a quarry source or a stone analysis says so.[source]
6 Carved sandstone panels and the date plaque
Softer, warmer sandstone was used where carving was wanted: ornamental panels between the windows and the plaque that carries the date 1883 — the single most reliable fact about the house, and the motif this website borrows for its own badge.[sources]
Inside: oak, tile and coloured glass
Minton tiles — the English encaustic floor tiles of the Victorian age — survive in the hall, and the survey records “Minton tile floors and fireplaces”. The oak joinery, the glass and the tile are the parts of the 1883 interior that the house’s later lives as apartments and a rest home left largely alone.[sources]
Who designed it? A correction
For some years the house has been attributed to the Lowell architect Otis A. Merrill, on the strength of an entry in Wikipedia’s list of his works citing the American Architect and Building News of 16 June 1883. We retrieved that issue. Its plate is captioned “Stable for Mr A. T. Atherton” — a stone stable with a conical-roofed round tower, recognisably the carriage house that still stands at 222 Fairmount Street as a separate private home.[sources]
So the record now says this: Merrill & Cutler designed the estate’s stable in 1883. The architect of the house is not named in the 1883 journal, in the 1981 survey (which left the field blank), or in any other record found. It may well have been the same firm; this site will say so when a document does.
The National Register nomination for the Belvidere Hill Historic District (1995) lists the house, its garage and the carriage house as contributing properties and calls the house “the district’s only example of the Chateauesque Style”.[source]
On the map
Thirty years apart, the two atlases show the estate unchanged in outline: the same 247,170 square feet the 1887 deed describes, the house and the stable, and the drive looping up from Fairmount Street. The land was first divided in 1944.[sources]
What changed, what survives, what we don’t know
- Survives. The 1981 photograph shows the street front — porte-cochère, tower, gables — substantially as it is today.[source]
- Added. A concrete garage beside the house, mid-twentieth century (survey). Its roof had collapsed by 2011.[sources]
- Altered, probably. The owner’s notes say the main staircase was removed in 1957 for an elevator, with new stairs built around it. The 1957 plans should settle this; until then it is unverified.[source]
- Divided. The house was split into apartments in the mid-twentieth century; the deeds of 1944 and 1951 divided the land.[sources]
- Lost. Fixtures, cabinets and lighting were stripped during the vacancy of 2009–11.[source]
- Unknown. Who designed the house. The only 1883 publication found is a plate of the estate’s stable by Merrill & Cutler of Lowell (below); a firm that designed the stable may well have designed the house, but no record says so.[source]
