Reuel E. Smith House
Near Syracuse, New York
The village of Skaneateles in the Finger Lakes sits at the northern tip of one of the clearest glacial lakes in the country, and on a hillside above the main street stands a house designed by one of the most influential American architects of the nineteenth century. Alexander Jackson Davis drew the plans for the Reuel E. Smith House between eighteen forty-eight and eighteen fifty-two.
Davis was the leading practitioner of the Gothic Revival and Italianate styles in America, the architect who more than any other gave the Hudson Valley and upstate New York their distinctive Victorian silhouettes. The Smith House is a documented example of his work outside his more famous commissions, recorded in the Historic American Buildings Survey. Davis believed that domestic architecture should grow from the landscape rather than impose upon it, and the Smith House, sitting quietly above Skaneateles Lake, makes that argument simply by existing.
