Oaks Cloister, Tudor mansion in Germantown, Philadelphia, United States.
Oaks Cloister is a three-story Tudor-style mansion in Germantown with decorative half-timbering and steeply pitched gable roofs. The building combines Renaissance Revival and Craftsman architectural elements throughout its design and structure.
Joseph Miller Huston built Oaks Cloister in 1900 as his home and studio, drawing on details from the Pennsylvania State Capitol he was then designing. The house stayed with his family until 1955, passed through later owners, and stood abandoned before Dr. Russell Harris and John Casavecchia bought it in 2002. Restoration by ONeal Studios finished in 2012, and the house joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.
Huston named the house Oaks Cloister and used it as a testing ground for details of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, then under construction. The ballroom holds a gilded coffered ceiling that took 25,000 sheets of gold leaf to restore, and a gold mosaic niche with George Grey Barnard's sculpture "Venus in the Waves".
The mansion is located on Wissahickon Avenue in Germantown and now hosts meetings and events following a major restoration completed in 2012. Access may depend on scheduled activities, so it is worth checking availability before visiting.
The ballroom's stone fireplace was not found intact: its carved panels lay under thick soot and dirt until restoration research revealed that Huston had imported it from Caen, France. It is thought to replicate a royal fireplace held at the Cluny Museum in Paris, said to have been made for King Francis I.
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