The Dupont-Whithouse House was designed by architects Oscar Cobb & Company and built in 1875-76. It was built by the Dupont Explosives Company, a major business interest in the neighborhood, for its agent Junot Whitehouse, the superintendent of the company's gunpowder plant in Chicago. The house was relocated a block from its original location in 1920. It has changed hands various times over the years and is in an ongoing state of rehabilitation. It was designated a Chicago city landmark in 1996.
According to the city landmark designation report, "The architectural composition of the DuPont-Whitehouse House is an excellent example of a simplified variation of the Italianate style which was extremely popular for commercial and residential architecture in the mid-nineteenth century. Abstracted from rural northern Italian architecture, the style gained great popularity in England in the 1830s and proliferated in the United States through the work of architect Alexander Jackson Davis and the widely circulated architectural manuals written by Andrew Jackson Downing. The style was extensively abstracted and copied by architects from the 1850s through the 1870s, the DuPont-Whitehouse House having been designed in the waning years of the popularity of the style.
"Faced with reddish-orange brick on all elevations, the exterior masonry shell of the
DuPont-Whitehouse House has the appearance of a monolithic cube, punctured by tall
narrow window openings detailed with decorative incised sandstone lintels and plain sills.
The principal street facade is symmetrically arranged about a slightly projecting central
entrance pavilion that extends the full height of the facade, terminating in a low brick
pediment. Projecting pavilions of this type were a common element in Italianate design,
emphasizing the central entrance and creating a formal, symmetrical composition for the
main elevation. The severity of the exterior masonry is softened by raised borders of orna-
mental brickwork that created a subtle enframement of the different wall planes through
an inexpensive yet visually effective means. Also characteristic of Italianate design is the
termination of the main body of the house with a decorative bracketed wood cornice
carrying a broad-eaved, low hipped roof and culminating in a decorative wood base for an
open-railed gallery at the apex. "
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