“Building homes for otherpeople appeals to me somuch more than building

and taking care of one for myself,” wroteBoston architect Eleanor Raymond(1887–1989) to her fellow WellesleyCollege alumnae in 1919. Raymond(figure 1) was born in Cambridge in1887. A 1909 graduate of WellesleyCollege, she became interested in gardening and landscape architectureafter completing her undergraduate education.

In 1916, Raymond enrolled at theCambridge School of Architecture andLandscape Architecture for Women. The school was then just a year old, havingbeen formed by Harvard University archi-tecture professor Henry Atherton Frost(1883–1952) in 1915 when a colleaguepersuaded Frost to give evening draftinglessons to an alumna of Radcliffe College.The Cambridge School provided womenwith a unique opportunity to receive academic training in architecture in an all-female environment. But the school’scurriculum, which focused solely on thestudy of domestic design and gardens,reflected prevailing gender biases andeffectively confined graduates to residentialwork. And yet, as Raymond’s message toher classmates suggests, the CambridgeSchool created professional opportunitiesunimaginable to previous generations ofAmerican women.1

After graduation in 1919, Raymondbecame a partner in Frost’s firm.2 Unfor-tunately, little is known of their workingrelationship. One can safely assume,however, that given Frost’s significantteaching commitments, Raymond over-saw the firm’s commissions and daily

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Frost & RaymondSuburbia and the Single-Family House of the 1920s

Nancy Gruskin

T H E A R C H I T E C T S O F W I N C H E S T E R , M A S S A C H U S E T T S

Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School

FIGURE 1. Eleanor Raymond

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operations. The printed announcement oftheir partnership stated that the firmwould specialize in “the private house,including its gardens, interior decoration,and furnishings.” By taking this course,Frost and Raymond stood to capitalizefrom the middle-class housing boom ofthe 1920s. The number of newly con-structed, single-family houses in suburbanAmerica nearly tripled between 1920 and1922, reaching a peak in 1925.3

Winchester, like many metropolitan suburbs of the post-World War I era,experienced significant growth in the1920s. Between 1920 and 1929, thetown’s population increased just overtwenty-one percent, and the number ofsingle-family houses in Winchester rosefrom 2,091 to 2,967.4 Throughout thefirst half of the twentieth century,Winchester prospered. According to a 1984study of Boston’s suburbs, Winchesterclimbed from the thirty-seventh positionin 1890 to the fifth position in 1940 onthe list of most affluent communities inmetropolitan Boston.5

FIGURE 2. Entrance façade of James H. Cleaves house, 10 Lawrence Street, Winchester, 1921, designed by Frost andRaymond. Illustrated in House Beautiful, November 1922.

FIGURE 3. First-floor plan of the Cleaves house. From House Beautiful,November 1922.

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The house Frost and Raymond designedat 10 Lawrence Street for Winchester salesman James H. Cleaves reflects thesestatistics (figure 2). Although the houseencompasses only 1400 square feet, it costover $21,000 to build in 1921, approxi-mately seven times the national averagecost of a new home that year.6

The Cleaves house, which has served asa parsonage for the nearby First BaptistChurch of Winchester since 1959, typifiedthe smaller American house of the 1920s.The waning reliance on domestic servants,due in part to a government curtailmentof European immigration in 1924, andthe ready availability of labor-saving tech-nologies such as vacuum cleaners, clotheswashers, and central heating, changeddomestic planning between the wars. The new interest in efficiency is reflectedin the first floor plan of the Cleaves house(figure 3). An entrance hall separates theliving and service wings of the house. Adoor at the left end of the hall leads to a small lavatory, a coat closet, and a laundry room. As originally designed, thelaundry room accommodated a washingmachine and an electric mangle and wasplanned to convert easily into a maid’sroom, should the need arise.

The kitchen adjoining the laundry roomreceived particular attention from Frostand Raymond (figure 4). In an article writ-ten for House Beautiful magazine in 1992,Cambridge School alumna Rose Greelyhighlighted the kitchen’s ergonomicdesign:

Looking beyond the breakfast room, theold-fashioned housekeeper will at first bestruck by the small size of the kitchen. Butone by one, its conveniences will press uponher notice, until she realizes that nothing islacking, that on the contrary, everything is socompactly planned that the cook’s labor iscut in half. She will be impressed by the sink,

FIGURE 4. (top) The kitchen wascompactly planned and designed toprovide a comfortable workspace forthe cook. From House Beautiful,November 1922.

FIGURE 5. (bottom) The breakfastroom included a door that openedonto a terrace. From House Beautiful,November 1922.

placed at the correct height for the house-keeper herself, with a special shelf on theinside of the cupboard door at the right forthe soap and sink brushes; the mixingcounter with its marble slab set at a lesserheight than the sink to allow the straighten-ing of arms necessary in the preparation offood; the space at the left of the stove for thetea wagon which is wheeled to the table; andthe location of the fixtures correctly relatedfor proper routing in the preparation of a meal.7

The kitchen led to a small breakfastroom, one wall of which was lined withshelving accessible from both rooms (figure 5).8 A Dutch door along the backwall of the breakfast room still opens ontoan open terrace on the south side of thehouse. The living wing of the house consists of a dining room overlooking therear terrace, a large living room (figure 6),and a book room, which, with its threewalls of casement windows, might havebeen more aptly labeled a sunroom.

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FIGURE 6. The living room was large and connected through a door to a “book room” that was lined with casementwindows in the manner of a sunroom. From House Beautiful, November 1922.

FIGURE 7. Second-floor plan of the Cleaves house. From House Beautiful,November 1922.

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On the second floor (figure 7), a bed-room and dressing room for the owners ofthe house are arranged within the foot-print of the downstairs living room. Themaster suite includes a sleeping porch.Three additional bedrooms and a bath-room complete the second floor.

In its symmetry, massing, and exteriordetail, the Cleaves house was inspired byeighteenth- and nineteenth-century domes-tic architecture. On the street side, thedemarcation between the service wing andthe living wing is denoted by a slight set-back of the former (figure 2). The twowings were further differentiated throughthe use of materials—originally, the livingwing was finished with flat tongue andgrooved siding and the service wing wasclad in wood shingles. An austere

FIGURE 8. The garden façade includes an ell with the sunroom on the first floor and sleeping porch on the second floor.An awning covers the terrace. From House Beautiful, November 1922.

FIGURE 9. Rachel Raymond house,Belmont, 1931, designed by EleanorRaymond. Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School

entranceway framed by pilasters and aclassical entablature adds a vertical elementto the otherwise horizontal façade, as dothe elongated windows of the first floor.On the garden side, the visual effect ismore three-dimensional (figure 8). Thefirst-floor book room and the second-floorsleeping porch form an ell that borrowsvocabulary from Greek Revival architec-ture of the 1830s and 1840s.

Writing about the Cleaves house in1928, art historian Henry-RussellHitchcock, Jr., saw the potential of itsdesign as a way to break through the“impasse” of traditionalism that typifiedAmerican architecture of the period.According to Hitchcock, who would laterco-author The International Style, a bookthat introduced European modernism

to an American audience, the wooden lat-ticework on the garden façade of the housewas “as modern as Oud’s wire grilles on hishouses at the Hoek van Holland.” 9

Hitchcock may have overemphasized theaesthetic similarities between the Cleaveshouse and the work of European mod-ernists such as J. J. P. Oud, most likely inan effort to advance the cause of modernarchitecture. But he correctly gauged theconservative taste of New England clients.Generally unwilling to embrace the con-cept of houses as “machines for living,”most New Englanders preferred to live inCapes, Colonials, and Tudors.

Raymond, however, exhibited a greatinterest in European modernism. She andher partner, Ethel Power, sought out thework of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and

other European modernists during a tripto Europe in 1930. The following year,Raymond designed a Bauhaus-inspiredhouse in Belmont for her sister RachelRaymond (figure 9).

Yet the Cleaves house proved to be amore representative work in Raymond’soeuvre. The period details of the house, itscompact plan, and Raymond’s attention tothe needs of the single family and thesingle-family housekeeper were under-standably of immense appeal to uppermiddle-class families searching formodern conveniences in a comfortinglyfamiliar form.

(Nancy Gruskin, a resident of Cambridge,Massachusetts, is an architectural historianand a lawyer.)

1. For more biographical information onRaymond, see Doris Cole, Eleanor Raymond,Architect (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1981);Nancy Gruskin, Building Context: The Personaland Professional Life of Eleanor Raymond,Architect (1887–1989) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI,1997); and Nancy Gruskin, “Designing Woman:Writing about Eleanor Raymond,” in SingularWomen: Writing the Artist, eds. KristenFrederickson and Sarah E. Webb (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003).

2. The firm of Frost & Raymond continueduntil 1935, when Raymond opened her own prac-tice in Boston.

3. See Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream:A Social History of Housing in America(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); GeorgeSoule, The Economic History of the United States:Prosperity Decade, From War to Depression(1917–1929) (New York: Rinehart, 1947); andKenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: TheSuburbanization of the United States (New York:Oxford University Press, 1985).

4. Bruce Winchester Stone, History of Win-chester, Massachusetts (Winchester, Mass.: Town ofWinchester, 1975), p. 40.

5. Matthew Edel, Elliott D. Sclar, and DanielLuna, Shaky Palaces: Homeowning and SocialMobility in Boston’s Suburbanization (New York:Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 357.

6. See Preston William Slosson, The GreatCrusade and After, 1914–1928 (New York:Macmillan, 1930), p. 141, and Wright, Buildingthe Dream, p. 195.

7. Rose Greely, “A Small House of Distinction,”House Beautiful 52 (November 1922), p. 423.See also “House for James H. Cleaves,Winchester, Massachusetts,” The ArchitecturalRecord 66 (November 1929), pp. 442–443;“House of James H. Cleaves, Esq., Winchester,Massachusetts,” The Architectural Forum(January 1927), pp. 95–96; and Ethel Power, TheSmaller American House (Boston: Little, Brown,1927).

Raymond’s life partner, Ethel Power(1881–1969), was the editor of House Beautifulmagazine when the Cleaves house was featuredin the publication. The two women met in1915 through their volunteer work asMassachusetts suffragettes, and they enrolledtogether at the Cambridge School. Power’stenure at House Beautiful provided Raymond(and the firm of Frost & Raymond) with invalu-able publicity. From the early 1920s until 1934,when the magazine’s editorial offices moved toNew York City and Power resigned in order tostay with Raymond in Boston, Raymond’s workwas featured at least twice a year in the magazine.

8. The wall separating the kitchen from thebreakfast room has since been removed, creatingan expanded kitchen.

9. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., “Four HarvardArchitects,” 2 The Hound & Horn (September1928), p. 45. Hoek van Holland (literally,“Corner of Holland”) is a town in South Hollandin the Netherlands. Dutch architect J.J.P. Ouddesigned low-cost workers’ housing in Hoek vanHolland in the mid 1920s.

NOTES

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Number 6, 2005

THE ARCHITECTS OF WINCHESTER,MASSACHUSETTS

Published by the

WINCHESTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY

P.O. Box 127Winchester, MA 01890

www.winchesterhistoricalsociety.org

EDITORMaureen Meister

GRAPHICSLMY Studio, Inc.