Walter Field House

Cincinnati, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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Located along Reading Road in northern Cincinnati, the Walter Field House is a wood-frame residence built in 1884 for Walter Field, a prosperous businessman and executive of the American Cotton Oil Company and Cincinnati Ice Manufacturing and Cold Storage Company. Designed by Samuel Hannaford—the English-born architect whose Cincinnati Music Hall had established his local prominence in the 1870s—the house represents the end of Hannaford's Victorian phase, blending Eastlake decorative elements with the Shingle Style that defines its appearance. The two-and-a-half-story structure features an asymmetrical plan with a multi-gabled roof, a columned pavilion and front porch elaborately decorated with spindle work, and an eight-sided gazebo anchoring the southern facade, while a turret rises on the northern side. Though converted into twenty-four studio apartments by the time of its 1980 listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the Field House remains a significant example of late-nineteenth-century domestic architecture and part of the substantial legacy of Hannaford's Cincinnati designs.