Chester Valentine House

Chester Valentine House is a residential structure built in the Tudor Revival style featuring steeply pitched gable roofs and decorative half-timbering on its exterior walls. The building displays diamond-pane casement windows, a distinctive gabled entrance, and a chimney constructed from brick and stone rising from the Lake Street side.

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.

This house represents how mail-order homes made architectural style available to everyday people during the early twentieth century. It shows how consumer culture and building design came together to make homeownership more accessible to ordinary Americans.

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.

Location: Saranac Lake

Inception: 1932

Architectural style: Tudor Revival architecture

GPS coordinates: 44.32250,-74.14222

Latest update: December 14, 2025 18:04