Believe it or not, but this apartment building on Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts is one of the most significant buildings of the type in the Boston area! This is Richmond Court, which is one of the oldest (if not the first) apartment house built in the northeastern United States that resembled an English Tudor manor house. The apartment building was constructed in 1898 from plans by architect Ralph Adams Cram, one of the best American architects of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Cram even moved into the building briefly before moving into a townhouse in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. The building set the tone architecturally for later apartment buildings in the Boston area, with many architects attempting (largely not as effectively) to design Tudor-influenced apartment buildings regionally. The development is also significant in that at a time when most Boston-area developers were building apartment houses that maximized the buildable square footage, as they do to this day, Richmond Court included a landscaped courtyard to provide residents with more light and air circulation. The development also included two separate town houses on either side of the apartment block.
Buildings of New England 