Graham Apartments // 1904

This handsome, and unique example of a three-decker in the English Revival style is located on a corner lot at 128 Davis Avenue in the Emerson/Brookline Village neighborhood of Brookline, Massachusetts. Built in 1904 from plans by architect and genealogist, J. Gardner Bartlett, whose work focused on colonial New England and the English origins of colonial families. Trained as an architect at MIT, he gave up architecture for genealogy, but still occasionally designed buildings in the Boston area. The building here was developed for Richard Graham, an Irish immigrant, who along with his wife, operated a laundry business in the village. The use of a shingle and stone entrance porch and entrance bay with stucco half-timbering and diamond-pane casement windows stand out architecturally as one of the few examples of a three-decker built in this style in New England.

Richmond Court // 1898

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.