Paris, Idaho - Architectural Treasures

Photo by Carmen Wimmer

In 1978, the Idaho Historical Society cataloged over 80 architecturally significant historic houses and commercial buildings in Paris, Idaho.  In this and future columns we will highlight one or two. The Paris Museum has information about this and other homes. 

John Tueller Home
165 East 1 South, Paris, Idaho

The former Tueller house, built in 1904, is a two-story buff brick residence built to an elaborated ell-plan. The roofs of both the lateral block and the cross wing are hipped. The cross wing, which extends toward the street, has in addition a gable emerging at left. To the right of the section surmounted by this gable, but still under the roof covering the front-facing wing, is a slightly inset enclosed foyer with an open corner balcony above it. To the right of the foyer, and filling the intersection proper is an open hip-roofed porch supported on Tuscan columns.

The great decorative interest of the house is in the masonry, particularly the brickwork.  Outset quoins articulate the corners. A pair of outset courses with a toothed band between them separates the two stories.  The first-floor windows are capped with double outset header courses, segmentally­ arched with side drops, except on the half-wide foyer window, which is flat-arched. Upstairs windows have plain segmental arches. First floor windows are further distinguished by heavy stone sills.  An unusually tall and completely intact corbelled brick interior chimney rises on the west side.  Wooden decoration is secondary but handsome: Tuscan porch columns; turned posts, brackets and balustrade on the balcony; shaped shingle and round-arched light in the gable.

The John Tueller house is architecturally significant as one of the most substantial and well-turned houses in Paris.  As the home of one of Paris' foremost masons, it is ample testimony to the local skill which produced most of the town's fine brickwork.  Built in 1904, this house exemplifies the turn-of-the­ century movement in late Queen Anne to a more regularized, simplified form with distinct classical overtones.  The other noticeable instance in Paris of this tendency is the J.W. Cook house (site 58). The Tueller house, however, also makes formal reference to the stone Tueller house of the late 1880's in its projecting quoins, segmental window caps and stone sills. The window caps and the toothed course of the mid-body are also allusive to the 1905 Bear Lake State Bank building (Browning Block, site 74), for which the Tuellers were responsible.   

With the use of relatively sedate turned woodwork and simple porch columns in addition to the ornamental brickwork, the Tueller house offers an assortment of materials which culminates in its shingled gable, indicating a continued allegiance to nineteenth-century surface variety.  John Tueller came to Paris with his family in 1885 and joined his father and brothers on the stonework of the Tabernacle.