Let’s try a thought experiment.

Close your eyes and picture a house designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. If you’re architecturally savvy, you probably imagined a large property – maybe even a mansion – with an asymmetrical, brick-and- brownstone façade and a corner tower with a conical roof.

The style, which was popular in the United States from 1880 to about 1910, has a heavy, lithic quality that imparts a sense of strength, solidity and permanence.

If you’re an aficionado of Richmond’s architecture, you might have pictured the Lewis Ginter House at 901 West Franklin Street. It was the first large-scale, fully developed residential Richardsonian in Richmond, and it’s an exemplary example of the style.

It also proved to be influential. After its completion in 1891, it helped shape the look of the city’s residential architecture for the next decade, said Chris Novelli, an architectural historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

By contrast, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that when we started this thought experiment, the Richardsonian house that sits cater-corner to Ginter House at 826-828 West Franklin Street didn’t spring into your mind.

Richmond architect Charles H. Read Jr. designed the property for Leon L. Strause, who like Ginter was a prosperous tobacco merchant. It was built the year after work on Ginter House wrapped up.

Strause’s house shares some of the style’s hallmark features, including a corner tower and rustic brownstone. But where Ginter House uses the red brick typically associated with the style, the Strause property utilizes golden-colored brick.

“Historians sometimes refer to the late Victorian era as the ‘brown decades’ because of the darker palette of its architecture, but this house shoots that out of the water,” Novelli said. “It’s bright and sunny.”

Read, who studied engineering at the University of Virginia and worked in Washington D.C. before opening his own firm in Richmond, designed other Richardsonian buildings here and in the nation’s capital, said Ray Bonis, a local historian and manager of The Shockoe Examiner, a Richmond history blog. But the Strause property appears to be the only one Read designed with golden bricks.

(Read is perhaps best known for designing the plan and first 15 buildings of Union Theological Seminary on the city’s North Side, beginning in 1896. He also designed Planters National Bank on Main Street in 1893.)

Another difference between the Ginter and Strause houses: Read’s design for the Strause property makes the Richardsonian style’s connection to the French Chateau style more explicit, with wall dormers ringing the top of the tower.

“That’s a feature of French chateaux that you rarely see in Richmond,” Novelli said.

Another distinctive French feature: the gargoyles at the top of the Strause tower.

Other striking exterior details on the Strause house include the loggia on the second level and the leaded- and beveled-glass panel in the house’s massive front door.

Inside, the house was originally distinguished by a suite of first-level formal rooms that included a drawing room, a library and a dining room along the western side and a living hall on the eastern side.

“It’s a floorplan you sometimes see in Victorian houses, particularly ones that occupy a corner lot, like the houses at 932 and 1000 West Franklin Street,” Novelli said. “The Maymont Mansion” – finished the year after the Strause property – “has a variation of the same floorplan.”

Standout interior features in the Strause property include the classical mantels in the drawing room and library, glass-doored bookcases and the stained-glass window above the main staircase.

Strause didn’t live in the building for long. According to the city directory,   J.W. Gordon occupied the house in 1901.

The property changed hands again in 1909. The new owner, E. R. Williams, stayed in the house until he sold it to Dr. Charles A. Blanton in 1928. (The classical mantels appear to have been added by one of these early owners, Novelli said.)

The following year, the house underwent its first significant modifications.

“Dr. Blanton converted it into a residence for his family on one side and medical offices for himself and three other doctors on the other,” Novelli said.

Blanton also added an extension onto the back of the house, the plans of which were drawn by W. Duncan Lee, a sought-after architect who designed 14 houses on Monument Avenue.

Blanton died in 1949, but his family continued to own the building until Virginia Commonwealth University bought it in the 1960s, Bonis said. VCU named the building Blanton House in honor of Charles Blanton’s grandson, Wyndham Bolling Blanton Jr., who was a VCU rector.

A portion of the building now houses offices for VCU’s dean of Humanities and Sciences.

Even today, the exteriors of the Ginter and Strause-Blanton houses survive largely as they would have appeared in the late 19th century, and each are striking examples of their style.

So let’s try that thought experiment again:  If I ask you to close your eyes and think of a Richardsonian house, do you picture it with golden bricks and a chateauesque tower with gargoyles ringing the top?

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