List offers hope for Richardson house

The owner hasn't been able to sell it, but prospects for saving the last home of architect Henry Hobson Richardson may be looking up.

This month the house at 25 Cottage St. in Brookline was declared one of the nation's 11 most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. While this designation provides no legal protection, it can attract attention from individuals and organizations who want to preserve it.

Of the 189 sites placed on the endangered list in the last 20 years, six have been lost and about half have been preserved, according to the trust.

The Brookline house has stood empty since 2000, when abutters bought it from Richardson's descendants for $1.2 million. The owner, Frederick Hoppin, has been trying to sell the 1803 house, which carries preservation restrictions, but could not be reached for comment on his plans.

In the meantime, the Brookline Preservation Commission has filed an application to designate the house, already on the National Register of Historic Places, as a National Historic Landmark. According to Roger Reed, Brookline's preservation planner, the designation would mean the house has national significance and would qualify a nonprofit owner for grants to help cover maintenance, rehabilitation, or renovation costs.

At the moment, however, the house looks more like a tear-down.

The push to save the home began three years ago after Brookline native Allan Galper returned to this area from New York, where he had learned of the successful effort to save a Richardson home on Staten Island.

Galper looked for Richardson's Brookline home and was appalled to learn that it could be demolished at any time. So in 2004, he started the Committee to Save the H.H. Richardson House, which petitioned for the home's placement on the trust's list.

"I was motivated because I feel Richardson has not been given his due" as a leading 19th-century American architect, said Galper, who gives lectures about Richardson for the committee. "He influenced a lot of his students, the Chicago School and Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm trying to bring Richardson the respect and recognition he deserves."

Richardson is renowned for his Romanesque style, use of native stone, and integration of buildings into the landscape. He lived in the Cottage Street house while designing Trinity Church in Copley Square in the 1870s, and remained there until he died at age 47 in 1886.

He located his firm there and encouraged colleague and mentor Frederick Law Olmsted to move to Brookline. Olmsted's home, on nearby Warren Street, is now a historic site run by the National Park Service.

Family members contacted last week said they wished the home could be connected to the Olmsted site. "They were linked in life," said great-granddaughter Alison Richardson, a landscape architect in Boston who grew up on Clyde Street in Brookline.

"He encouraged Olmsted to come to Brookline. They are historically, aesthetically tied."

The Brookline house where Richardson lived was built in the "West Indies" style -- with a two-story colonnade wrapped around three sides of the north wing -- by a wealthy merchant.

"It must have made him feel like home," said Alison Richardson, "because of its southern architecture." Richardson was raised in New Orleans, came north to study at Harvard, and remained here after marrying a Boston girl.

Two homes in the same style still stand in Brookline, the Gardner House also on Cottage Street and a neighboring house, according to Dennis De Witt, a member of Brookline's Preservation Commission.

David Richardson, a grandson, remembered stories of H.H. hosting his "young architects" for dinner and tennis. "He treated them like family."

Designing was so much the culture of the family, Alison Richardson said, that H.H.'s daughters married Richardson firm draftsmen, and his sons went into the field as well. Even today, she said, those who don't enter a design field are considered "not really Richardsons."

But David Richardson, a banker, recalled that his grandfather left his widow and six surviving children penniless.

"Although he had a lot of rich clients . . . he was in great debt," he said. "The family was bailed out by neighbors," including David's maternal grandparents, the Blakes, who were bankers.

So far, the Richardson house has been viewed only by prospective purchasers looking for a single-family home, Galper said. Last year, his committee organized a group of professionals to look at potential uses by an institutional buyer. The committee came up with a list of educational or nonprofit uses, and worked out what needed updating and what could be saved.

Ideally, Galper said, the home will attract such a buyer, perhaps a university in need of housing for faculty or its president, allowing some public access.

"It's a unique treasure. It's practically unaltered since his time. We could still save it."