Monadnock Summer

Book excerpt: A fascinating look into a special corner of New England summer home architecture: the many styles of homes in Dublin, New Hampshire. The small, high, mountain town of Dublin, New Hampshire was known as an artistic and literary retreat in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Less well known, but equally fascinating, is Dublin's claim as home to just about every architectural style and several major domestic architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. On its slopes, overlooking deep, spring-fed Dublin Lake and the looming Mount Monadnock, we find a virtual encyclopedia of building styles, ranging from the plain and unadorned to the most ornate and ambitious. A list of the architects who plied their trade in this small town would include Charles A. Platt, Peabody & Stearns, Rotch & Tilden, Henry Vaughan, and Lois Lilley Howe. In this immensely readable and enjoyable survey, veteran architectural historian William Morgan takes the reader on a verbally vivid and visually varied tour of the terrain, concentrating not only on the traditional and expected examples that crop up in Dublin as often as elsewhere, but also on the eccentric, unusual, and often unique extravaganzas that pepper its slopes. For Dublin was a place which for a century had both the money and the taste to indulge architects of all stripes and styles, and to give them commissions to design among the most beautiful and original examples their talents could produce.