Built around 1840 for Ellery Hills, a manufacturer of shoes, this Greek Revival house, with an unusual elliptical portico, is a reminder of a time when many other such houses lined Main Street in Hartford in the mid-nineteenth century. Architectural details used on the facade of this house are featured in Chester Hills‘s Builder’s Guide, published in Hartford in 1834.
Built in Hartford in 1858, this Italian villa is across Wethersfield Avenue from Armsmear. It was first bought by merchant Albert Day. Later owners included Mary Borden Munsill and Edwin Taylor. It had a notable restoration in 1979 and now serves as offices. A recent article discusses this house in relation to the ideas of Andrew Jackson Downing on the benefits of the Italian style.
Built at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn Streets in Hartford for the lawyer, John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker. The original structure of 1853 was expanded into a Gothic Revival villa by architect Octavius Jordan in 1861. This was the first house built in the notable Hartford neighborhood of Nook Farm. Isabella, an important figure in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The house was altered in the early twentieth century when part of the roof was raised in 1906 and the porte-cochere added in 1924. Today the house is surrounded by 1950s-era apartment buildings and is itself an apartment building.
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