Built as the home for the family of an architect who was about to become one of Providence’s significant designers in the early twentieth century, this house is a life-size calling card, a brick-and-half-timber advertisement for up-to-date design as well as the success of its occupant. Its picturesque yet academically correct Tudor Revival form and detailing projected a fresh new architectural vision that superseded the Queen Anne style’s whimsical admixtures. The house, calculatedly designed for its corner lot, embraces its setting through terraces and walls that extend the planes of its principal elevations into the landscape. Clarke’s partner, A.J. Spaulding, produced a winsome pen-and-ink perspective drawing of the house, complemented with a first-story plan in one corner. Publication in 1897 of that drawing in American Architecture & Building News, then the country’s most prestigious professional architectural journal, testified to both the importance and the success of the house’s design.

The interior’s principal spaces radiate from the ample stair hall, visibly understood from the exterior as the space within the conical-roof tower at the intersection of the south and west wings. From it open the study to the west, the dining room to the east, and the parlor, as it was originally designated, to the south.