Seabright (Newport, Rhode Island)

 house, shingle style (architecture)

 Upload a photo

Seabright, the David Hunter House (1987; William Burgin, architect):

A large, elaborate, and geometrically ambitious 31⁄2-story Neo-Shingle Style house built into a slight rise on its property. The core of the house is an asymmetrical wedge whose simple gable roof embraces only the uppermost 2 levels of interior space on the uphill east side but extends down over 5 levels on the downhill west side from attic to ground-level drive-through garage with low-round-arch openings. Along this western slope of the roof, large hip-roof dormers rise above one another and intersect with a round-plan conical-roof turret on the northwest corner. The south-facing façade is dominated by a large stout-Tuscan-column semicircular-plan porch, open on the 1st story, providing access to the principal entrance, and screened on the 2nd; the porch spills to the west down cascading steps to the driveway around the random-course- ashlar foundation and extends east toward terraces and secondary porches; above this porch, at the 3rd- story level, is a semicircular-plan bay window. There are 2 tall chimneys, one on the façade and one near the center of the house.

This house draws its visual inspiration from two of McKim, Mead & White’s most iconic houses of the 1880s, both built nearby: the Isaac Bell House (1882-83) on Bellevue Avenue and the demolished William Low House (1888) in Bristol.

While this house does not contribute to the significance of the district because it falls outside the period of significance, it nevertheless is consistent in type, form, scale, and setting with those properties that create the district’s significance.

(polygon apprx.)