page_title: Dolobran (Haverford, Pennsylvania)
section_title: House
hierarchical_section_title: Dolobran (Haverford, Pennsylvania) / House
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Frank Furness
context_page_description: Dolobran is a Shingle Style house at 231 Laurel Lane in Haverford, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Frank Furness for shipping magnate Clement Griscom in 1881, and was expanded at least twice by Furness. The house and 146-acre estate served as a summer retreat for Griscom, his wife, and five children.
  It was named for Dolobran, the Welsh manor and estate of Griscom's ancestors.
context_section_description: The main house stands on the edge of a hill, with the land sloping down on the north, east and south sides to tributaries of Mill Creek. 
  Furness altered an existing stone house, turning its first and second floors into the hall and upper hall of the new house, and shooting out rooms in multiple directions. This was one of his most exuberant and freewheeling suburban houses, featuring a stone water tower with Juliet balconies, his trademark "upside-down" brick chimneys, roofs with jerkin head gables, dormers topped with gabled, hipped, shed (and even one tall, pyramidical) roofs, a great bay window thrusting out at the top of the stairs, and a Japanese tea room appended to the wrap-around porch. Architectural historian James F. O'Gorman described the exterior as "a plastic chorus of towers, bays, sheds, gables, and chimneys." The upper floors were clad in wood shingles, varying between shakes and fish-scales. 
  The interior was also Japanese-influenced. The hall's walls and ceiling were paneled in dark, mahogany coffering, with a narrow, latticed stair in the center of the room rising steeply like a ship's gangway. Surrounding this are blue-and-white, Delft-tile murals and a Jacobean chimneypiece – gifts from the Queen of the Netherlands, in gratitude for one of Griscom's ships helping to rescue a Dutch ship that was sinking. The hall's ceiling has a large rectangular cut-out, framed by a latticed railing, that allows natural light to stream down from second-story windows.
  Architectural historian Michael J. Lewis sees the influence of the German Gothic Revival's "love of picturesque vagaries and eccentricity" in Dolobran. Rather than the "disciplined picturesque[ness]" of H. H. Richardson, Stanford White or Bruce Price, who "sought to impose classical values of calm and repose on plans that were rather irregular," Furness embraced a "restlessness and turbulence" in his complex and sometimes unorthodox massing of volumes. Dolobran was an artistic breakthrough for the architect, a milestone on the road to "an original synthesis" that would inform his later buildings.
caption: Frank Furness (1839-1912).
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