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(James Noud)
This handsome red brick neo-Georgian house with exquisite interior woodwork was built to the plans of noted Chicago architects Holabird and Roche for a Manistee lumberman and his wife. Patrick Noud (1845–1925) came up the Great Lakes to the northwestern Lower Peninsula, where he worked as a log driver, foreman, and superintendent and eventually acquired a sawmill and lumber company in Manistee. In 1891–1892 Noud served as mayor of Manistee. The huge house is massed with intersecting pedimented gables. A full-height rounded bay projects from the 2nd Street facade. The windows have large single panes below six-over-six upper sections and are topped with splayed caps containing keystones. Modillions support a dentiled cornice that crowns the entablature. Porches with classical detailing front the north and east facades. The interior of the house conveys the delight of its owners in the products of northern Michigan's forests. It is richly and elegantly finished in quarter-sawed oak with birch, ash, and other woods. The Manistee Daily News for October 30, 1895, said, “Various costly woods have been used in the different rooms and they all harmonize perfectly.” In particular, it likened the large reception room to “a dream.” Here the piano-polished antique oak woodwork blends with a ceiling finished in richly modeled plaster relief work of “Empire design” colored cream and gold, and tan-brown walls inlaid with scrolled plaster molding, colored terra-cotta, and gold.