[MassHistPres] Storybook buildings

[Dennis De Witt]

What may be considered “Storybook” architecture seems to have fuzzy boundaries.  

I’ll be interested to see other people’s examples — but here are a few thoughts about possible predecessors or outliers

Might I suggest . . . 
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The Schoolmaster’s Shelter in Franklin Park, Boston, 1890-92, Edmund Marsh Wheelwright, then Boston City Architect, working with F.L. Olmsted.  Olmsted wanted a thatched roof but Wheelwright insisted on tile for maintenance reasons.  Thatched roofs, real or curvaceously sculpted faux-thatched roofs rendered in cedar shingles, seemed to become a stock feature of later storybook houses.  (I could cite several examples in the Chicago area.)


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Already sometime before 1891 Wheelwright had built this thatched barn and well — and a springhouse — for S.D. Warren’s Mattapoisett estate. 

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And Wheelwright’s Lampoon “castle” 1904-09 at Harvard — a building with a face and bow tie that was serious about its jokes in multiple ways.

Around Boston there are a lot of “quaint” or “twee” 1920s houses that I would think are part of the “storybook" story — not sure if one can call it a movement or style.  Here is 231 Pond Ave Brookline, 1928, designed by Byron Merrill.  Note the picturesque  random original red and black clay roof tiles and especially the over-fired, distorted clunker brick.  Its somewhat Scandinavian/ North German character is perhaps as much Brother Grimm than Hans Christian Andersen. Often such houses partly half-timbered.  They were always asymmetrical and almost always brick.
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The two earliest use of these distorted bricks I have found are in Art & Crafts California houses.  Originally they were selected from over-fired kiln rejects.  They seem to first appear in Boston in the Fenway studios.  There are also some in the Lampoon building; Wheelwright called them “bench” bricks.  They became rather popular in Boston in the ‘20, and clearly came to be deliberately produced.  

After 1940 Alvar Aalto and then Eero Saarinen, both teaching and working at MIT, discovered and used them (Aalto’s MIT dorm and Saarinen’s MIT chapel), leading to a brief fad for them outside New England in the 1960s.

Dennis De Witt

> On Sep 16, 2025, at 1:42 PM, Bob McCarroll via MassHistPres <masshistpres at cs.umb.edu> wrote:
> 
> I'm doing a Springfield Preservation Trust on-line lecture this winter about Storybook architecture. Does anyone know of good examples in New England besides Santarella in Tyringham?
> 
> Bob McCarroll
> 
> 
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