Lumberyard-owner Potter engaged in the city’s most stylish architectural firm to design his “statement” house at one of the city’s most prominent intersections. Here we see a large and elaborate house built in the fading years of the high-style Queen Anne mode, but done exceptionally well by the local masters, Stone, Carpenter & Willson, who by the late 1880s were advancing into Renaissance classicism and the Colonial Revival. The not-cutting edge design of this house suggests the tension that could exist between architect and client at the time; this relationship made for delicious fodder in contemporary novels by Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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