They attracted considerable attention when they were completed as the first Colonial Revival buildings in Albany,[3] and its first fully electrified house.

The surrounding neighborhood is densely developed and urban, with most buildings from the same era, originally designed for residential use.

The house is a three-story five-by-five-bay structure of brick laid in Flemish bond, with corner quoins, on an exposed white marble foundation.

An iron fence with brick posts topped by wooden spheres sets it off from the streets on the south and east.

[2] At the roofline is a classically inspired cornice with modillion blocks and guttae topped with a wooden balustrade.

The doorway, in a marble surround, is flanked by two narrow keystoned windows similar to those on the second story.

[2] A modern glass and steel door with a transom opens into a central hallway with wooden wainscoting.

The dining room, opposite, is paneled in darker mahogany, complemented by a green marble mantelpiece.

Inside its walls were historically unfinished brick and the floor partially paved, with minimal decoration, although that has been changed by the building's adaption for office use.

A thousand employees worked in their mills, and the firm had a large portion of dock space on Albany's waterfront.

He eventually became president of the Duluth and Northern Minnesota Railroad, and married into the Van Rensselaer family, descendants of the patroons of the area during Dutch Colonial times.

[2] By the turn of the century the lumber business in Albany was declining as forests and markets opened up further west.

In 1904 he commissioned Stanford White, who had worked for Henry Hobson Richardson as a draftsman thirty years earlier on the state capitol but had not built anything of his own in the city, to design a house on the site of an old chapel that was demolished to make way for it, along with a carriage house on a nearby block.

[2] In 1956 the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany bought the house and converted its second floor to office space.