Cottage Farm Historic District

Cottage Farm is a 67-acre neighborhood in the northeast corner of Brookline, Massachusetts, near downtown Boston and with access to the Charles River. It consists mainly of single-family houses, with a few educational and religious institutions, built of brick, stone, shingles and stucco. The oldest building is the stone Sears-Talbot House, built before 1844 in an early Gothic Revival style. Development began in 1850, when Amos A. Lawrence bought 200 acres and, with his brother William, began subdividing the land. The first houses, designed in the Gothic "cottage" manner popularized by Andrew Jackson Downing, gave the area its name. Later buildings include Queen Anne houses by builder John Wales, Mansard houses of the 1880s, Georgian Revival residences of the early 1900s, and the 1936 Gibbs-Katz House, described as the first International Style building in the Boston/Cambridge area. The district was listed for its architecture and its link to Lawrence, whose family financed many early structures and helped give the area a consistent scale.