Idlewild is a historic building near

Media, Pennsylvania Media is a borough in and the county seat of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It is located about west of Philadelphia, the sixth most populous city in the nation with 1.6 million residents as 2020. It is part of the Delaware Valley metropolita ...

, designed by the Victorian-era

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

architect

Frank Furness Frank Heyling Furness (November 12, 1839 - June 27, 1912) was an American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his diverse, muscular, often unordinarily scaled b ...

as a summer cottage for his family. He spent summers there until his death in 1912.

History

The house was built about 1890 on the grounds of the Idlewild Hotel, which Furness had designed in 1886. The home was Furness' payment for his design of the hotel. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in May 2013. The Furnesses lived in Philadelphia during the winter, but summered in more informal cottages. Prior to 1892, they summered in

Cape May, New Jersey Cape May is a city located at the southern tip of Cape May Peninsula in Cape May County, New Jersey, United States, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the country's oldest vacation resort destinations, and part of th ...

, in a house he did not design. Furness died at "Idlewild" in 1912.

Design and Construction

"Idlewild" is constructed with a stone basement and brick first floor. The upper floors are framed in wood and clad with cedar shingles. It has a wrap-around covered porch, high-ceilinged rooms, and an irregular roofline with variously shaped windows and eyebrow dormers. Furness placed the service rooms and front and back stairs (with a shared landing, as at the Emlen Physick House) at the front. This increases the privacy of the rooms behind, and the visual interplay between the differing scales of the "service tower" and main house gives vibrancy to the façade. The "chronic eccentricity" of his ornament in other buildings is "rather restrained" here. But the complex façade both expresses function and presents the viewer with a puzzle to decipher.

"For his own house in Media,
urness Urness is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Ted Urness (1937–2018), American football player *Zoë Marieh Urness Zoë Marieh Urness (born 1984) is a photographer of Alaskan Tlingit and Cherokee Native American heritage. She ...
shrank the plan of the contemporary University Library, and erected over it a stone, brick, and shingle house." — James F. O'Gorman.

The basic form of the house – a multi-storied, semicircular apse springing from an anchoring block, with the entrance at their juncture – is closely related to Furness's 1888 design for the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

Library (now the

Fisher Fine Arts Library The Fisher Fine Arts Library was the primary library of the University of Pennsylvania from 1891 to 1962. The red sandstone, brick-and-terra-cotta Venetian Gothic giant—part fortress and part cathedral—was designed by the acclaimed P ...

). In the library, the architect placed the grand staircase in a tower at the front, separating circulation to the building's upper stories from the reading rooms behind. The library's two-story,

ovoid An oval () is a closed curve in a plane which resembles the outline of an egg. The term is not very specific, but in some areas (projective geometry, technical drawing, etc.) it is given a more precise definition, which may include either one or ...

-shaped Rotunda Reading Room is wrapped by an arcing cluster of one-story seminar rooms. "Idlewild'"s porch echoes this, wrapping around the house's ovoid parlor. Furness played with similar volumes in his design for the

Bryn Mawr Hotel The Baldwin School (simply referred to as Baldwin School or Baldwin) is a private school for girls in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1888 by Florence Baldwin. The school occupies a 19th-century resort hotel designed by ...

(1890-91). The library has been described as "a collision between a cathedral and a train station."

Gallery

File:Idlewild Media PA porch exit.JPG, Front entrance and porch File:Idlewild Media PA porch end1.JPG, Apse-end w/ wrap-around porch File:Idlewild Media PA lunette.JPG, Idlewild window detail File:Idlewild Media PA back side.JPG, South (rear) facade File:Idlewild Media PA porch window.JPG, Window detail File:Idlewild Media PA 2nd fl br.JPG, 2nd floor bedroom File:Proceedings at the Opening of the University of Pennsylvania Library 1891.jpg, Furness' floor plan of the U.Penn library(1891), which he used for Idlewild's design.

Other Furness works

''See main article:

'' "Idlewild" is located at the top of Gayley Hill in Upper Providence Township just south of the borough of

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. This was a mile west of "Lindenshade," the Wallingford summer house of his brother, Shakespearean scholar

Horace Howard Furness Horace Howard Furness (November 2, 1833 – August 13, 1912) was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century. Life and career Horace Furness was the son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness (1802–1896), ...

.Design of "Lindenshade" (built c. 1873, demolished 1940) is attributed to Frank Furness. It was also a short walk to the Moylan-Rose Valley train station, which enabled him to commute to his architectural office in Philadelphia. Some projects completed by Furness in the area at the same time as Idelewild (1888-1891) include: File:University of Pennsylvania Library 1904 Detroit Publishing Co.jpg, University of Pennsylvania Library (1888–91) File:Williamson Free Trade School.JPG, Rowan Hall at Williamson College of the Trades (1890), in nearby Middletown. File:Furness 261 Grant CMHD.jpg, Furness summer cottage in Cape May, NJ File:Bryn Mawr Hotel.JPG, Bryn Mawr Hotel (1890–91) (now Baldwin School), Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. File:Lindenshade circa 1873.jpg, Lindenshade (1873), the Wallingford house of Franks's brother, Horace Howard Furness File:View of the Idlewild resort near Media, PA 1897.jpg, The Idlewild Hotel (c.1897), Media, PA

References

Sources

*Lewis, Michael J.
Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind
New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. * {{Frank Furness Houses in Delaware County, Pennsylvania Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania Frank Furness buildings Queen Anne architecture in Pennsylvania Shingle Style architecture in Pennsylvania National Register of Historic Places in Delaware County, Pennsylvania Furness family