2070 Kent Road (1980)

The earliest house on the 1980 Heights Heritage Tour, "the Briars" is a great square Georgian Revival home that stood all alone on Kent Road for almost ten years. The architect was Arthur N. Oviatt, who built the house around 1898 for Carl E. Warner, a Cleveland drygoods merchant.

A transitional structure, "the Briars" combines some of the best aspects of the shingled Queen Anne style of the late 1800s and the then-emerging Georgian (Colonial) Revival style promoted by McKim, Meade & White. The veranda across the facade, the gambrel roof punctured with dormers, the crisply detailed entablatures and balustrades are aspects of the Queen Anne style but devoid of the frivolity often associated with it.

A ballroom, de rigueur in a grand home of this period, occupies the whole of the third floor. Ornamentation of the interior is in the neo-Classical style, exquisitely refined and maintained.