Welcome to the front terrace, stop eight on the self-guided audio tour. I hope you get a chance to take a moment and sit down and enjoy the terrace, and soak in the neighborhood and the architecture of the homes around this place.

From here, I’d love to talk to you a little bit about Italian Renaissance architecture. This home is an Italian Renaissance Revival style, and that last word, revival, is actually an interesting detail.

In 1908, when Cotton Mansion opened, the newspaper hailed it as the diamond of the Condon neighborhood. That was kind of literal. There is actually a glass pyramid skylight that’s above the stained-glass dome in the grand staircase that lets in natural light and illuminates that in the daytime.

The Italian Renaissance itself originated in Italy and thrived in the 1500s in Europe. This period of history was typified by the rediscovery and emulation of all the Roman and Greek antiquity. You think of the columns and the pillars; that’s all Italian Renaissance.

Many of Europe’s oldest structures, like Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the Vatican, are 1500s Renaissance recreations of Roman and Greek architecture from 1,500 years earlier. Italian Renaissance Revival, then, is drawing from the time of the 1500s Renaissance, when they drew upon antiquity.

We’ve been putting pillars on buildings for several thousand years now in homage to the Greek and Roman architects, if you stop to think about it.

Italian Renaissance Revival structures are most commonly commercial buildings, public buildings, or mansions. This style is meant in reserve to be imposing and grand, which means it can only be in large buildings. They’re also very symmetrical buildings. Think of capitol buildings, buildings like that, with a low-pitched roof or built in stone. They have dentils, medallion carvings, Roman columns, all features of the Italian Renaissance Revival style.

Not to be confused with Italianate architecture, a style popular in the 1850s to 1890s, which is Italian influence but much more ornate and embellished versus accurate. The earlier Italianate period was typified by an asymmetrical design that was very decorative, including the Victorian and Gothic Second Empire styles of the second half of the 1800s.

From the mid-1890s to the First World War, architectural design returned to a more restrained, symmetrical, accurate style. You see that in Tudor, Italian Renaissance, Jacobean, Spanish Mission Revival, and Colonial Revival.

All of the 1890s to pre-World War One architecture design, after the First World War, would pull away from this restrained classic and look forward to Art Deco, mid-modern, modern Arts and Crafts, Craftsman, and Prairie styles starting in the 1920s.

Back inside, the first impression of an expansive foyer and grand staircase reaching up almost 40 feet fits this grand impression of Italian Renaissance Revival, which is exactly what it was designed to evoke.

To continue the tour, please head back inside and upstairs to the second-floor gallery. You’ll find the QR code for the second-floor audio guide on the wall next to the third-floor stairway.