Juxtapositions of houses (2 & 16 Freeman Parkway) built the same year by the same architect are always revealing, but they can be exciting as well when the architects are masterful as Jackson, Robertson & Adams. Here we find two interpretations of historic English sources. At the top of Freeman Parkway is a seemingly standard center-hall box, with an ell on the east elevation, dressed up like a Cotswold cottage, with stuccoed walls, grouped windows, slate roof, and low shed dormers. But a stroll around the house reveals that the fenestration patterns suggest a much more innovative plan than immediately apparent, the hint to the freshness of the firm’s designs. The Hartwell House is more strictly revivalist than Thornley (2 Freeman Parkway) but is nonetheless deftly done Tudor, nicely detailed and proportioned, and beautifully sited on its hillside lot. Mrs Hartwell and her son moved here from the stylish Queen Anne house she and her husband had built more than thirty years earlier on the West Side; the area around the Cranston Street Armory had ceased to be a neighborhood of choice by the early twentieth century (though it has now turned around again almost a hundred years later!), hence their decision to move to the fashionable new (such was its name) Freeman Plat.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
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