2485 Fairmount Boulevard (1981)

The section of Fairmount Boulevard from Cedar Road to close to Coventry was developed as the Euclid Golf Allotment. Its name came from the Euclid Golf Club upon whose golf course and woodland acreage it was laid out. The club was established in 1900, prospered, suffered an internal dispute, withered away as its members joined Mayfield and other country clubs, and died in 1912. Barton R. Deming, acting with his brothers, seized the opportunity to develop the golf club's acreage. To assure harmony of building design, Deming engaged the Columbus, Ohio architectural firm of Carl Eugene Howell and James W. Thomas. These men and their head designer, Herman J. Albrecht, first acted in 1913 by designing the Allotment's most picturesque residence for Mr. Deming himself on a narrow lot snaking down to the intersection of Fairmount and Cedar Road.

The house served two functions. It put to good use an irregular triangle of rockbound land some five hundred feet long, not over forty feet wide at its widest point and dropped off from the boulevard into a creek ravine. The Deming house also stood at the entrance of the Euclid Golf development so that the whimsical, turreted, half-timbered house that seems to emerge from its sandstone ledges provided, as expressly requested by Mr. Deming, an impressive advertisement for the Allotment.

The house has been divided into several apartments, but the master apartment on the third floor retains direct access to the narrow garden strip extending along the ridge created by the Fairmount excavation on one side and the densely forested ravine on the other.. The main living room still boasts the original stenciled designs on the beamed ceiling and an ornate plaster fireplace.

The house is know to some as the "Spite House" after the legend that Deming built the house with malicious intent to block the view from the formal gardens of the manor house which then stood immediately to the east up Cedar Road. Indications that the architects may have drawn the site's potential for an unusual dwelling to Mr. Deming's attention cast some doubt on the legend. But the story remains neither confirmed nor denied and the house is keeping its secrets.