Loudoun House was built in 1850 for Francis Key Hunt, one of John Wesley Hunt and Catherine Hunt's twelve children. The Gothic revival is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been the home to the Lexington Art League since 1984.
The home was designed by New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis and is believed to be one of only five surviving castellated Gothic Revival villas in the United States designed by Davis. The home was constructed by local builder John McMurtry who popularized Davis' Gothic Revival designs in the Bluegrass. Ingleside, once along South Broadway, was a companion home to Loudoun House that was demolished in 1964.
The walls of Loudoun House feature a hollow brick construction, a method that utilizes air space as insulation. The house once featured a "gilded lambrequin that fitted over the [parlor] arch to the oriel pair of matching mirrors in perpendicular style, and the mantel originally in the drawing room ... have since been removed." If you attended last month's deTour of the Gratz Park Trio, you will recall having seen these features in the Dudley House on North Mill Street.
 |
| Floorpans of Loudon House as contained in the National Register Application, which were duplicated from Clay Lancaster's Antebellum Homes of the Bluegrass |
According to the National Register application, Loudoun House is "one of the largest and finest examples of Gothic Revival Architecture in Kentucky, if not in the South. ... The primary significance is that the house displays the architectural facet of the entire Romantic Movement which bloomed in the 1850s and indirectly displays the social facet through imaginative journeys into a lifestyle as depicted by the house and grounds."
|
|
Comments