Hired by Baldwin, the newly named president of a southern railroad, to update and enlarge the facade of an extant building, George Post designed a new face for Château-Nooga in a composition related to the Anglo-American imagery of H. H. Richardson's Watts Sherman House (
NE159), built several years earlier and a few blocks away. Much of the intended multi-colored effects of half timbering, carved wood trim, and red and yellow brick walls have been recently restored. In the grouped gables, trimmed by bargeboards with elaborate fernleaf reliefs, a sense remains of what critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer later called the “most unique” house in Newport.