The Albert Fitch Bellows House is a textbook example of the influence of Andrew Jackson Downing's book The

Architecture of Country Houses, published in 1850. The massing and roofline of the Bellows House are virtually identical to the “Farm House in the English Rural Style” illustrated by Downing, although the Bellows House incorporated some Gothic features, including interpretations in wood of hood molds around the windows and tracery in the entrance gable. The integration of the house with the rolling landscape and the siting of the house at the edge of a pond also are consistent with ideals of mid-nineteenth-century American picturesque architecture. Bellows was an architect who had become an artist, specializing in scenes of rural New England. When he moved to Winchester and built this house, he became one of the town's early commuters, traveling on the train to Boston, where he was principal of the New England School of Design for Women.