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Edward and Eliot Cabot, members of one of the wealthiest families in the city, designed this house for Boston merchant William Larkin. The two Cabots also designed the nearby John Murray Forbes mansion, which is no longer extant. Both the Forbes and Larkin houses reflected the strong Anglophile proclivities of the Cabots, who designed red brick villas in a peculiarly English mode that was neither Italian Renaissance nor Gothic, but contained elements of both. Indeed, the use of unpainted red brick was somewhat controversial at the time, as it stood out among the predominately white dwellings in semirural Milton (although heavy planting now makes the house difficult to see).