Historical Homes
A 1909 mansion in Northeast Portland’s King neighborhood is a marriage of two disparate building concepts that continue to work well together: Decorative Queen Anne styling constructed of durable cast concrete blocks.
The Jennie Bramhall House, named after the original owner, was also selected to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of its high integrity and preserved floor plan.
The historic home has been featured on renovation shows such as “Restoration Realities” and on HGTV, as well as highlighted in Preservation Magazine published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and used as a setting for movie productions.
The house on a double corner lot has a wide front porch, projecting bay windows and a round tower. Under a steeply pitched roof are ornamental flourishes — wreath motifs, dentils and egg-and-dart detailing — made of cast concrete.
The covered entrance is supported by six Ionic pillars, and the wraparound veranda has cast concrete balustrades.
Inside, formal rooms have original oak floors with mahogany inlays, box-beam ceilings and built-in cabinetry with leaded glass. The living room fireplace has a brick elliptical arch, and French doors open to the landscaped backyard with stone patios and a mosaic fountain.
Jennie Bramhall lived here for a short time before selling it, according to National Register historians who deemed the mansion “the most elaborate example of a cast concrete block residence” in the historic Albina area of North and Northeast Portland.
The 114-year-old mansion was designed by Alfred H. Faber, an architect and building contractor who helped promote the use of sustainable concrete blocks with a stone-like texture. Rusticated, split-rock concrete blocks made by cement contractor Charles Vinton form two stories of the home’s exterior and the entire three-level tower.
Concrete blocks were considered an economical alternative to natural stone foundations, walls and porches. The blocks, a mix of sand, Portland cement and water, were usually made at the building site using a small machine with interchangeable molds that formed different patterns on the block face.
The architectural blocks were popular from the mid-1880s through the years after the First World War, according to Val Ballestrem of the Bosco-Milligan Foundation’s Architectural Heritage Center in Portland.
