The overall form of this house is reasonable typical for houses built in Providence around the turn of the twentieth century. What distinguishes this is the detail, borrowed largely from the Prairie School. The wall-surface articulation, especially, with its roman-brick first-story cladding carried to the sills of the second story windows, is an obvious and charmingly clumsy riff on the façade of Frank Lloyd Wright’s well-known Winslow House of 1893-94. This was the home of the family of machinist George H. Smith. Gustave T. Malmstead, owner of Providence’s first supermarket, bought the house in 1915, and his daughters, who both remained spinsters, lived here until their deaths in the late twentieth century.

– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture