44 SITE NAME: Thomas Innes house SITE # 62
42 West First Street South
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| Photo by Chris Coray |
The Innes house is architecturally significant as a late example of the classical cottage type. It was built contemporaneously with the first bungalows in Paris but shows a clearer affinity with nineteenth- century types than do even the most conservative examples of the incoming style.
Its short-ridged roof is still steeply hipped and flared and locally-milled door and window heads, still perfectly intact, are of a type common in Paris for a generation. Although the classical cottage is an old type, the Innes house is the earliest example of it to survive in Paris; the two others included in this inventory, the Kate Innes cottage and Lewis cottage (sites D80 and #81) are later and show marked hybridization with the bungalow.
The former Thomas Innes cottage built in 1908, like the one built for relative Kate Innes about a decade later, is a somewhat square hip-roofed house in the "classical cottage" mode. But unlike the later house, which with its exposed rafters, inset porch, and generally lower profile shows the influence of the bungalow style, this cottage has a markedly vertical aspect, particularly in the very steeply hipped flared roof with its short lateral ridge. Both front and east side elevations of the south-facing house are perfectly, and identically, symmetrical, with centered transom doors flanked by tall sash windows. All openings have molded heads. There is a low hipped ell at rear left. The whole is sided with shiplap. A pair of handsome corbelled brick chimneys used to rise from the rear slope of the roof.
Thomas Innes was a farmer and carpenter who came to Paris in 1870 at the age of six. His cottage is owner-built.
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