John Carter Brown House
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Scalabrini Villa (John Carter Brown House)
1872. 860 North Quidnesset Rd. (west of Harrison St.)
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Scalabrini Villa (John Carter Brown House) (John M. Miller)
This ambitious Second Empire villa was built by John Carter Brown on land adjoining his father-in-law's summer home as a retreat from his late-eighteenth-century mansion in Providence. It is an unusually high-style house for nineteenth-century North Kingstown, with pressed brick walls, fine dressed granite trim, and a convex mansard. The symmetry of its central pavilion is offset by an aggressively corbeled and patterned chimney set in a swelling easterly bay and a delicate stickwork portecochere to the west. A bracketed porch running the length of the house once provided views southward over sloping lawns, now filled with sprawling one-story residential development. The first floor interiors retain some of their original detail, including tiled fireplace surrounds and an unusually fine brass newel post lamp. To the rear is a handsome Colonial Revival barn. In 1907 the Brown family gave the house and 100 acres to the Rhode Island Hospital for use as a summer home for crippled children. In 1957 it passed to the Society of St. Charles, which operates it as a nursing home.
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