As neither Crate and Barrel nor its wedding registry existed in 1895, New York governor Roswell Pettibone Flower had a 14,000-square-foot mansion built in Watertown, New York, as a wedding gift for his daughter. Commissioned from architects Hugh Lamb and Charles Alonzo Rich, who together as Lamb & Rich designed Teddy Roosevelt's country house, as well as a long list of New York City buildings in the Victorian and Queen Anne styles, the Emma Flower Taylor Mansion was put up for $1.5M in May. The home was converted into eight apartments in 1940—what used to be the grand ballroom and dining room is one unit, and the billiard room is another, making for a spread that ranges from mind-blowingly ornate to merely very, very nice—but still seems to pretty soundly embody what an essay on the listing website describes, rather floridly, as the "full flowering of Victorian-era exuberance."
Built from large blocks of Medina sandstone quarried outside Rochester, the Victorian features a "full-scale veranda which essentially is another room of the house," along with (purple prose warning) "broad and muscular proportions on the exterior, using a mix of picturesque architectural styles," that give way to an interior marked by "tremendous delicacy." The listing, which counts 14 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms on a 1.2-acre grounds, assures that the Nationally Registered manse could be easily converted back into a single family home.
· 241 Clinton Street [Franklin Ruttan]
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