Treasured Hunt

Frank Sanchez remembers hanging around his family's Revere home back in 1959 when his father coaxed his mother into looking at a house for sale in Swampscott, and invited him along.

"It looked like a haunted house," recalled Sanchez, a teenager at the time. "She was upset and I was too. I thought it was a bad move."

But his father, Joseph, had a vision for the house and bought it anyway. Soon, father and son set about realizing that vision by stripping truckloads of wood ornamentation from the house.

"We removed gingerbread, porches, widows walks, shower stalls out back, et cetera, et cetera," said Sanchez. His father also added windows in some places.

Of the finished product, he said, "You want to talk about a showcase house, that was a beautiful house."

Indeed it is. The Puritan Road home, with its pitched roof and peaked gables, and oceanfront perch, is this year's Designer Showhouse for the Jewish Community Center of the North Shore, an annual fund-raiser, and is for sale for $2.3 million.

Equally amazing, though, was what the house had once been -- a prime example of the Stick Style of architecture designed by the man widely considered the dean of American architecture. And no one knew. True, there had long been talk that the house was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, architect to wealthy families such as the Vanderbilts and the man credited with elevating both the study and practice of architecture to a new plane of professionalism in America.

"People always said it was a Richard Morris Hunt," said local historian and real estate broker Sylvia Belkin. "But nobody knew for sure. It was very nebulous to me what that meant."

Looking at the Swampscott house now, it's hard to discern the signature of a man who later designed such elaborate Gilded Age buildings as The Breakers in Newport, R.I., the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., and the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Asked to write a history of the house for the Showcase, Belkin wanted to establish the house's provenance once and for all. So she started digging, and confirmed it is, in fact, an early Hunt house.

"It really shows you that there are still discoveries to be made," said Sally Zimmerman, preservation specialist with Historic New England's Historic Homeowners program.

That a house by "a major 19th century architectural figure" would go unnoticed all these years is "very rare," she said. "It's a great occurrence."

And the discovery is perhaps all the more prized precisely because the house is a simpler wood-frame structure that stands in stark contrast to Hunt's other very grand buildings, Zimmerman said. "It allows us to understand the full picture of an architect's work."

Known locally as both the Haskell House and Beachhurst, the Swampscott house was built in 1871 in the Stick Style, which is characterized by flat bands of wood applied in geometric patterns and -- in Hunt's hands especially -- by exuberant projections of gables, dormers, bays, porches, and porticos.

Among Hunt's other works are the original Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, the base of the Statute of Liberty in New York City, as well as mansions in Newport, R.I., on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Born in Brattleboro, Vt., in 1827, Hunt was the first American to study at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which subsequently trained other famous American architects and influenced the design of some of the country's most noted buildings, including the Boston Public Library. Hunt is considered America's first professional architect; previously, architects trained as apprentices in offices, according to Paul R. Baker, a history professor emeritus at New York University and author of the definitive biography, "Richard Morris Hunt."

Belkin's detective work eventually led her to Baker, who provided a ringing confirmation the Swampscott house was indeed by Hunt.

Belkin had done research at the Essex County Registry of Deeds, where she learned that Jacob Haskell, who had hired Hunt to design the house, lived on Beacon Street in Boston. One of Hunt's other Massachusetts works was also on Beacon Street, a since-demolished double house owned by Martin Brimmer, a founder of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Sanchez, who along with his sisters is selling the house, gave Belkin a photograph of the house that was believed to have been taken around 1900 . Then, one of Belkin's colleagues on the Swampscott Historical Commission came up with a picture of the Griswold House in Newport, which Hunt did in the Stick Style and completed in 1863. Comparing the pictures of the two houses, Belkin was struck by the similarities.

"I thought, 'Geez, this is really looking very hot,' " she recalled.

The final aha moment came as she read Baker's book. An exhaustive list of 241 of Hunt's designs -- some built, some not -- ends with eight undated plans, including this: "Haskell house, location unknown (status unknown.)"

Baker had added a note in the appendix, "The author would appreciate hearing from any reader who might have information regarding additions to or corrections for this list."

After an exchange of e-mails that included Sanchez's photograph, Baker wrote back: "Eureka! This is definitely a RMH (Richard Morris Hunt) house. The details are so similar to other houses that Hunt designed at the beginning of the 1870s in the 'stick style,' with the exposed posts, beams and braces."

Today, however, one of the few visible vestiges of the Stick Style remaining on the house, now covered with white siding, is the distinctive porte cochere at the entrance.

Sanchez and his sisters inherited the house after their father passed away in 2004 and have tried on and off since then to sell it. Through their conversations with Sanchez on the history of the house, Sylvia Belkin and her daughter, Elizabeth, both real estate brokers, ended up with the listing.

"This is a family house," said Elizabeth Belkin. "It's hard to convey that until you come in here. Nothing can express how well-proportioned the house is."

That's not surprising, given that the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was known for "the detail with which the interiors were worked out and the function of the rooms," said Zimmerman, of Historic New England. "It's by no means an amateur effort."

Though no one can say with certainty how much Hunt was involved with the interior, the floor plan, the elevations, the fireplaces, and the wainscoting are undoubtedly his design.

As Sanchez can attest, that design translated into something almost intangible, a feeling of comfort and welcome.

"It's such a huge home, but it had an intimacy to it," he said.

The house was like a magnet, drawing people to gather there; it also has, in effect, a private beach because there is no street parking nearby.

"We had tremendous memories in that house," Sanchez said.

Though impressed Hunt designed the house, Sanchez said he does not regret having removed so much of the home's exterior decorative elements.

"They were truly in disrepair, true disrepair," he said.

The fact that this house is sided, though, may have preserved some of the design on the walls beneath it. If a new owner decides to restore the home to its original Stick Style, Zimmerman said, the Historic Homeowner program offers advice on recapturing lost elements.

It's not unusual for old houses with a lot of wood, with all its inherent maintenance challenges, to "become so denatured that they're not recognizable, and then they're lost," Zimmerman said.

"This building is lucky to have been brought back from the brink," she said. "It's very lucky to have been recognized and saved."