[MassHistPres] Storybook buildings

[SAMUEL R BLAIR]

How about Beaufort in Gloucester?

https://www.historicnewengland.org/property/beauport-sleeper-mccann-house/

Sam Blair


> On 09/17/2025 6:02 PM EDT Dennis De Witt via MassHistPres <masshistpres at cs.umb.edu> wrote:
> 
>  
> 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 . . . 
> 
> 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.)
> 
> 
> 
> Already sometime before 1891 Wheelwright had built this thatched barn and well — and a springhouse — for S.D. Warren’s Mattapoisett estate. 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 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.  
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> 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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