Wallingford Creekside House for Sale, An American Original

News

If there was any period in our country’s history in which it could be argued that true American architecture began to emerge, it was the Gilded Age. This era of grand mansions built to grace the “thief barons” saw the rise of the skyscraper in Chicago and the Shingle Style house in New England.

Here in Philadelphia, architect Horace Trumpauer, one of the most famous architects of the Golden Age, continued to work in the Classical Greece, Georgian and Regency England styles as he designed major public buildings like the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the years after World War I and even larger homes like Lynnewood Hall in the 1890s. . But his contemporary, William Lightfoot Price, who also made a name for himself designing Gothic and Tudor homes for the Philadelphia affluent, began to fret in the same decade.

His search for new American architecture would end with his embrace of the Arts and Crafts movement and his influential role in the creation and design of the utopian community of Rose Valley, just south of Wallingford’s creekside house for sale. But it wouldn’t be wrong to say that this house began with this house he designed for a couple likely to be friends of his, John and Henrietta Walter, in 1897.

Like Price himself, the Walters were Quakers who did not come from the Philadelphia Foundation. John was a salesman for a dry goods company and Henrietta ran a boarding house in Rittenhouse Square. But Price also became less interested in designing homes for the wealthy. And while you’ll think highly of this home if you’re looking to move to Delaware, you wouldn’t need a fortune to buy it.

Although this house has the usual trappings of houses built for the upper middle class, including the servants’ quarters (although incorporated into the main house itself), in its design, construction and choice of materials it has already set the direction in which will take it. Just a few years later, in 1903, he wrote a book called “House-Building and Furnishing; Being a New Collective Edition of Model Houses for Little Money,” one of the first books to postulate that attractive, well-designed homes should be available to all.

This home illustrates principles he laid out in a similar later book, “Moderate Cost Cottages and Gardens”:

“It seems to me that the advantages of using common and coarse domestic materials are threefold. First, it is cheap. Second, it is easily obtained; and third, it is beautiful.”

But there’s nothing cheap-looking about the way Price used raw stone and timber to build this house together. A high degree of craftsmanship shines through in every room of this home.

Many of its interior details, such as the pointed balustrades and soaring railings of the staircase, are foreshadowing of the Arts and Crafts style, but much of this home is based on a common New England vernacular vocabulary of the Shingle style. However, it also contains a nod to Price’s Gothic past.

This gesture is found in the octagonal tower at the right end of the house when you face it. Inside this tower you will find a den on the first floor and bedrooms on the two upper floors.

The den is connected to the living room, which is part of a more modern, open and informal main floor. Both living and dining rooms feature rails of the type found in many arts and crafts homes and large bay windows. (In fact, large windows with deep sills are found throughout this home.) Also note that the dining room has a built-in hut to store and display chinaware.

On the other side of the den, accessed via a room that currently serves as a home office, is a sunroom with a simple wooden ceiling. Since this is actually an interior room, the brickwork here is more regular and formal, but the exterior brickwork, like the one on the front porch, is rustic by design, using random stones held together by thick mortar in a style known as “barn” dashing “which imitates stonework in eighteenth century barns.

That photo of the early 20th century home above shows two open areas that have since been closed. One of them, a balcony on the second floor, now serves as a walk-in wardrobe in the master suite bedroom.

The other, a triangular divider between the dining room and the kitchen, serves as an indoor display area for plants and the like now. Its window allows light into both the dining room and the kitchen.

The kitchen and bathrooms are two of the major modernized rooms in this home. The kitchen includes a breakfast room and Amish cherry cabinetry. It also includes a Wolf Professional Collection, a KitchenAid refrigerator and a Bosch dishwasher.

Many of the bedrooms on the second floor are connected to each other by doorways that allow for a lot of flexibility. The basic bedroom, which occupies the entire south end of the second floor, is connected to a hallway near that closet that leads to an adjoining bedroom.

This bedroom, which has built-in bookshelves, is currently used as a home office and home.

The basic bathroom has been updated with modern plumbing and a glass shower cabin. Other bathrooms have been similarly updated, but one still has a 1930s clawfoot tub. One of the bedrooms on the north side also has a fireplace.

The leaded glass window in the main stair well features a mixture of clear glass on the lower half and cracked glass above, providing a bit of privacy to the upstairs floor while still providing a view of the backyard.

The house, named for the stream that divides the property – “Netherbrook” – is one of three structures located on the 2.47-acre sloping lot. Beneath one of the two footbridges that cross Netherbrook is a theater of the same rustic stone. This structure needs some work to be really useful again.

To the north of the main house is an old building, a Gothic hut built as a stable. Its lower level booths now have a garage space for three cars. Its upper floor contains an accessible apartment that you can legally rent to a tenant who can help you pay off your mortgage.

This apartment has a little history of its own. In the years after World War II, this home was owned by the Macon family. Virginia McConne, who became the Director of Retail for Ladies House Magazine In 1944, a contemporary kitchen was installed in the apartment in the early 1950s. This kitchen was the epitome of modern housewives in the January 1953 issue of magazineand still persists to this day, only in a more modern neutral color palette.

You’ll also enjoy a great deal of privacy here, because Walker Lane is a private street run by eight residents whose homes are located along it. However, you’ll also enjoy easy access to Center City because Walker Lane is a very short walk from Wallingford Regional Rail Station.

Incidentally, Wellingford is where Price was born. This one-of-a-kind, cost-effective home for sale in Wallingford creekside, then, has a great deal of character and impeccable proportions. It also has quite the history. Guess who’s marketing it, then.

good print

bed: 6

bathrooms: 3 full and a half

cubic feet: 4232

selling price: $939,000

112 Walker Lane, Wallingford, Pennsylvania. 19086 [Scott Laughlin | BHHS Fox & Roach Realtors]