Lyman C. Josephs House - Middletown RI
Posted by: nomadwillie
N 41° 29.227 W 071° 16.550
19T E 310008 N 4595333
The summer house designed in 1882-1883 for Lyman C. Josephs by Clarence Luce of Boston. This dwelling is an example of Shingle Style. The Josephs, a family from Baltimore occupied their house until their deaths in the early 1940's.
Waymark Code: WM167EM
Location: Rhode Island, United States
Date Posted: 05/26/2022
Views: 0
The summer house designed in 1882-1883 for Lyman C. Josephs by Clarence Luce of Boston occupies a high, rolling, grassed site of about two acres in a hilly part of Middletown, a water-bordered eastern appendage of the resort city of Newport, which it overlooks. This dwelling is a commodious but not pretentious example of what this writer used to call the "country-club style" and what Vincent Scully, Jr., has more recently and definitively termed the Shingle Style. It is, including the attached former stable, a long, rectangular two-and-one-half-story gambrel-and gable-roofed structure laid out on an east-west axis and seemingly grows out of the ground on which it stands.
The Josephs, a family from Baltimore, were apparently people of affluence and cultivation but not affected by the ostentation prevalent in Newport, and they occupied their house regularly every summer until their deaths in the early 1940's. Many Shingle Style houses (and there are famous ones in the middle of Newport's "summer colony") rise from their sites proclaiming themselves as masterpieces of innovative plan and new forms of wood or stone adornment. The Josephs house is different: its true distinction is in its modesty, its kinship with the earth out of which it seems to have naturally grown, and the full but unpretentious comfort which it contains.
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