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James Gardner House([1898])
3489 Stanley Street, Montreal, QC, Canada
Residential, Urban house [semi-detached; basement, 3 floors, 5 bedrooms, 1 servant's room]; brick and stone; composite

Client: James Gardner
Architect: E. Maxwell

Description: Mr. James Gardner became the business associate with T.E. Hodgson and G. Sumner in 1879 for Hodgson Summer & Co. This company took over a wholesale company, which dealt with importing and sale of clothes and raw materials. In 1898, James Gardner commissioned Edward Maxwell to design his urban house on Stanley Street. The adjacent house with a bearing wall on the lot line forced Edward to build the house for Gardner by incorporating the wall as a common wall in between the two houses to create a duplex. However, the adjacent house was demolished and the available archival drawings do not reveal any information on the house. The house for Mr. Gardner is a combination of Tudor style with Gothic revival details. The house exhibits new ideas in planning decoration that Edward learned in Boston. The jagged, stepped-back façade and the parapetted gable, which on the elevation drawing is flanked by pinnacles, enhance the picturesque character of the house. The smooth two-storey high semi-circular bay projects from the wall, providing a foil for the Gothic triangular oriel window. A stylistic circular fanlight unites the triangular oriel and the segmental arched doorway surrounded by Beaux-Arts style Ionic columns. The parapetted gable is featured with the finial at the top and the clove-like foil in the middle. This stylistic feature enhances the beauty of the elevation. The entire façade is characterised by the Queen Anne/Victorian Style crenellated parapet and quoins. All window openings are decorated with cut stone at the edge leaving the lintels and sills plain, without any ornamentation. The second floor is clearly distinguished by the belt course with bracketed cornices, which runs at the junction of the first and second floor. All external features such as entrance arch and columns, fanlight, bracketed cornices, crenellated parapet, quoins and pinnacles are painted white, a colour which contrasts effectively with the brick façade. If the exterior owes much to the ideas that Edward absorbed in Boston, so do the plan and the interior details. Interestingly, the plan adopts the circular room instead of the oval theme. Edward placed a large circular drawing room to the right of the entrance vestibule. The hall in the middle, which is accessed by the vestibule acts as a central distribution core and provides access to the drawing room at the front and dining room at its rear. The important feature of the hall is the large fireplace resembling a throne with a crown on the top. The hall, opposite the fireplace provides access to the butler’s pantry which, in turn, leads to the kitchen and the dining room. The dining room, also with a large bay window, has direct access from the hall through a large sliding door. Edward designed furniture for the dining room, which reflected his artistic skills. Similar to the hall, the dining room contains a large fireplace, but the details are not as elaborate as in the hall. The available drawings reveal that Edward designed all the cabinets, shelves, and light fixtures. The pantry and storage attached to the kitchen at the rear became a balcony on the first floor of the library. The first floor is accessed through the stairs in the butler’s pantry and accommodates two large bedrooms. The space above the kitchen and dining room in the first floor is designed as a library, which opens onto the balcony at the back. The second floor comprises three large bedrooms and one servant’s room, and the combined living and dining room below becomes a large billiard room on this floor. The house for Mr. James Gardner still stands on Stanley Street and is the perfect testimony to Edward’s talent for designing an elegant and efficient dwelling. The house was remodelled into nine apartments by the previous owner and has been now reduced to six by the present owner.

Holdings: Urban house (semi-detached; basement, 3 floors, 5 bedrooms, 1 servant's room); brick and stone; composite
39 Drawings: 27 ink on linen; 9 ink on paper; 2 pencil on paper; 1 blueprint
3 Presentation drawings: floor plans, attic floor plan
2 Development drawings: electric lamps
8 Working drawings: floor plans, elevations, section
26 Detail drawings: mitoyen wall, elevations, entry, hall, vestibule, dining room, structure, archway, staircases, mantelpieces, furniture, fittings, dado
4 Photographs: 2 finished exteriors; 2 finished interiors
1 File folder: clipping

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