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The Larches

Architect
Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr.
Year
1808
Style
Georgian
City
Boston, MA
Collection
colonial & revolutionary
The Larches
Photo: Daderot, Public domain
See it on the map

The Larches at 22 Larch Road in Cambridge is a 2½-story wood-frame house built around 1808 by William Gray, a Salem merchant, as a summer house on one of the last of the large Brattle Street estates before it was subdivided. In 1915 the house was physically moved to its current site and renovated by architect Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr., who oversaw alterations that preserved its early character.

the building

A house on the move. The Larches wasn't built where it stands: it originally sat on one of Cambridge's large Brattle Street estates and was relocated to 22 Larch Road in 1915, when Longfellow Jr. carried out the renovations and alterations that shaped the house as it appears today.

the style

The Larches combines Georgian and Federal architecture, and its 1915 move and renovation preserved rather than erased that early character—the interior and exterior both still carry significant Federal-style detailing from its early nineteenth-century construction.

More on Georgian

the architect

The 1915 move and renovation were overseen by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr., a member of Cambridge's Longfellow family, though little else about his individual career is recorded here.

significance

The Larches was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Its twentieth-century owners included the composer Randall Thompson.

nearby

All 282 buildings in Boston