Chester Valentine House, Tudor Revival house in Saranac Lake, United States
Chester Valentine House, also known as Strathmore Cottage, is a one-story, L-shaped dwelling built in the Tudor Revival style. It has a gabled entrance, diamond-pane casement windows, and a prominent chimney of brick and stone. It is a Sears kit house of the Strathmore model, erected in 1932 in Saranac Lake, Franklin County, New York.
The house was built in 1932 as a Sears catalog kit model Strathmore, a prefabricated building option created during the Great Depression. It gained official recognition when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
The house is a Sears "Strathmore" kit home, sold by mail order as a set of numbered, pre-cut parts that arrived by rail and were assembled on site. Its Tudor Revival look, with diamond-pane casement windows and a brick-and-stone chimney, came from a catalogue rather than an architect's commission.
The house sits on Lake Street in Saranac Lake and can be reached easily by car through local roads. It is located within Adirondack Park, a protected natural area where you can park and view the exterior from the street.
This house is one of the few surviving Sears kit homes from the 1930s still standing in its original form, as many others were demolished or heavily altered over the decades. Its survival with original features intact makes it a rare window into how mail-order home construction worked in that era.
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