Following the model of railroad-centered developments such as Cape May, New Jersey, Houston commissioned a large summer hotel to attract guests who it was hoped would buy properties in the vicinity. The former hotel frames a central court facing Springfield Avenue, while its rear porches look out on the cricket club's lawns. With its broad porches, mixture of hung slate on the walls, and banded brick and stone chimneys, the inn looks to Bedford Park and the English Queen Anne as its source. Like Frank Furness's Bryn Mawr Hotel (
MO8) that later served as the home of the Baldwin School, this was adapted in the early twentieth century as the home of the elite boys school Chestnut Hill Academy, which continues to the present.