First Harrison Gray Otis House
Museum in Massachusetts
The First Harrison Gray Otis House is a historic house museum and National Historic Landmark at 141 Cambridge Street in the West End of Boston, Massachusetts. The house, built in 1795–96, was the first of three houses built for Massachusetts politician Harrison Gray Otis to designs by Charles Bulfinch. It is notable as one of the earliest three-story brick houses that came to represent the Federal style of architecture, and its interiors show the influence of Robert Adam. The house is now the headquarters of Historic New England, a regional preservation organization, and is open year-round for tours.
Description and history
The house is the simplest of the three designed by Bulfinch for Otis. The design is said to be inspired by a William Bingham house that Bulfinch saw in 1789 in Philadelphia, which was in turned derived from a house in London. The house is three stories tall, five bays wide, with elegant string courses. Today's graceful entrance was added after 1801. Above it is a fine Palladian window, and above that a lunette. The third floor is very short; ceilings are just over 6 feet tall.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19564302. Authority coordinates are 42.361, -71.065. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1795, 1789 and 1801.
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This entry incorporates text from “First Harrison Gray Otis House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.