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 (59 hectare) 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.
House
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 the passengers and crew of a sinking Dutch ship. 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.
Circa-1888 expansion
The circa-1888 expansion of the house was more restrained, and included the three-story east addition – with pyramidical roof and stone chimneys – the octagonal study, and the verandah with its graceful, arching brackets. The three-story, L-shaped servant's wing – with expanded kitchen and bedrooms above – either was part of these alterations or those in 1894–95.
The new interiors were in a different style and at a larger scale. Furness was exploring the Art Nouveau, and used a calla lily motif – sometimes literally, sometimes abstractly – for the mantel brackets in the drawingroom, the fireplace mosaics in the master bedroom and library, the stone carvings of the study fireplace, and a glorious leaded glass window, also in the study. The circa-1888 alterations probably included the front bedroom's buff-colored, terra-cotta fireplace and mantel, the detailing of which is closely related to the reading room of Furness's contemporaneous University of Pennsylvania Library (1888–91).
1894-95 expansion
With the 1894-95 expansion, Griscom turned his large house into a mansion. A library beneath the dining room, probably part of the circa-1888 alterations, had opened onto a sunken patio. Furness excavated into the hill, turning the basement library into a balcony room overlooking a subterranean art gallery. The vast two-story space – 40 by 50 feet (12.2 x 15.2 m) – is illuminated by two long strips of skylights, flanking the terrace above, and large windows at the room's east end where the hill drops away. This created an unexpectedly grand – and, importantly, fireproof – setting for Griscom's collection of landscape paintings and British portraits. The addition's exterior walls are faced with stone similar to the house's, but the art gallery's gigantic scale and Beaux-Arts formality is incongruous with the jocular informality of the original house.
The 1894 commission may have included houses for two of Griscom's children and their families. A January 1901 magazine article notes three houses on the property.