Willard T. Sears must have been well acquainted with J. Pickering Putnam, a Newbury Street neighbor of his former partner Charles Cummings. Certainly he admired his work, as this adjacent pair of apartment hotels evinces a strong debt to two earlier Back Bay buildings designed by Putnam. The Marlborough quotes from the brownstone base, buff brick, and restrained Renaissance ornament of Putnam's Haddon Hall (
BB19
), at Commonwealth Avenue and Berkeley Street, completed the previous year. (The Marlborough's mansarded top floor was added in the 1980s.) The Hotel Cambridge is more florid, borrowing the materials vocabulary of Putnam's nearby Hotel Charlesgate (
BB63
), but adapted to a tighter, more cubic volume.