Anderson, Larz House (Society of the Cincinnati)
- Architect
- Little & Browne
- Style
- Beaux-Arts
- City
- Washington, DC
- Collection
- the city beautiful
Anderson House was built between 1902 and 1905 as the winter residence of diplomat Larz Anderson and his wife, Isabel Weld Perkins, an author and American Red Cross volunteer. Architects Arthur Little and Herbert W. C. Browne of Boston designed the Beaux-Arts mansion, which stands on Embassy Row in Dupont Circle. It now serves as the international headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati.
the building
A collector's showcase. The Andersons used the house to entertain Washington's social and political elite while displaying the fine art and historic artifacts they gathered across 40 years of extensive travel together.
A gift with no heirs. The Andersons had no children. After Larz Anderson's death in 1937, his widow donated the house and its entire contents to the Society of the Cincinnati.
A research library on the art of war. The house now holds the Society of the Cincinnati's international headquarters along with a research library specializing in 17th- and 18th-century military and naval history, and is also open to the public as a house museum.
the style
The mansion is designed in the Beaux-Arts style, one of the grand Gilded Age houses that gave Embassy Row its stretch of imported European grandeur.
More on Beaux-Artsthe architect
Arthur Little and Herbert W. C. Browne practiced together as Little & Browne, based in Boston, and designed Anderson House as the Andersons' winter residence in the early 1900s.
significance
Anderson House is a National Historic Landmark, a DC Historic Landmark, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is described as home to the Society of the Cincinnati, the nation's oldest hereditary and patriotic society.
nearby
- Townsend House
- Embassy Gulf Service Station
- Thomas T. Gaff House
- Blaine, James G., House
- Charles Evans Hughes House
- Dumbarton Bridge