2025 Chestnut Hills (1982, 1986, 1989)

Designed in 1916 by Meade and Hamilton for Louis H. Hays, President of the Kaynee Co. (clothing manufacturers), this home is a graciously proportioned country house with servants' wing, set in a terraced and wooded expanse sloping down to Cedar Glen.

A spacious hall and wide stairs are accented by graceful ironwork. The servants' stairs have a quaint arts-and-crafts cookie cutter wooden railing, common on porches of the period. The large living room is illuminated with formal high windows of birch and leaded glass. The dining room is adorned with a Mucha print from Paris, a long, contemporary table for ten designed by Peter van Dijk, and a grape motif molding.

There is an airy pergola and passageway to the triple garage, designed for one car facing one way and two cars side-by-side and perpendicular to the first; perhaps the shorter space was planned for an electric model. The garage had its own gas tank and ceiling device for car washing.

Upstairs in the main section of the house are four large bedrooms with two shared baths; one bedroom has a fireplace; another, a Palladian window. What appears to have been a ballroom on the third floor completes the main room arrangement.

Ceilings in the house are in particularly fine condition. It is said the builder waited one year for the house to settle before completing the plaster work. Several ceiling are vaulted decoratively.

Some further unusual original features of the house, not necessarily still functioning, include a sprinkling system for upstairs window boxes, a telephone system between rooms, a built-in vacuum system for cleaning, a built-in, gas-fired clothes dryer and both coal and gas furnaces in the basement, the use of each depending on the season. By means of switches in the master bedroom, all lights in the house can be extinguished and all bedroom doors locked.