Horace Jayne House
- Architect
- Furness & Evans
- Style
- Colonial Revival
- City
- Philadelphia, PA
- Collection
- furness's gilded city
The Horace Jayne House was built in 1895 as both home and office for Dr. Horace Jayne, a zoologist and University of Pennsylvania professor, and his wife Caroline Furness Jayne, an ethnologist known as an authority on string figures and the architect's own niece. Frank Furness designed it a block south of Rittenhouse Square, at the southwest corner of 19th and Delancey. After Caroline's death at 36, the house passed through later owners as different as a department-store heir and a synagogue congregation.
the building
A niece's commission. Caroline Furness Jayne was Frank Furness's niece, making the house both a family commission and a professional one — an architect designing for his own relative rather than a stranger client.
The greyhound radiators. Department-store heir Jacob Lit of Lit Brothers, who acquired the house around 1928, probably added its radiator covers cast with frolicking greyhounds, the work of sculptor William Hunt Diederich — a decorative flourish layered onto Furness's original design by a later owner.
the style
The Horace Jayne House was built in the Colonial Revival style, a quieter register than the muscular Victorian work Furness is best known for elsewhere in the city.
More on Colonial Revivalthe architect
Frank Furness designed the house through his firm, Furness & Evans, in this case for his own niece Caroline Furness Jayne and her husband Dr. Horace Jayne.
significance
The Horace Jayne House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
nearby
- Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia
- Edward Drinker Cope House
- John C. Bell House
- St. Mark's Episcopal Church
- Estey Hall
- Sun Oil Building