Nathaniel Russell House

South bay of the house

Russell commissioned an unknown architect to build a large townhouse in the then popular Federal-style. Sited on a large lot in downtown Charleston, the house is rectangular in plan, three stories tall, and faced in gray Carolina brick. A bracketed cornice and paneled balustrade separate the walls from the low hip roof, concealing it from view to better express the pure geometrical shapes of the house.

The more important facades — the entrance facade (facing east) and the garden facade (facing south) are treated formally and arranged symmetrically. The windows of the second, most important story, the “bel etage,” are the tallest; all eleven are capped with marble voussoirs and set into niches with red brick arches, the whole ensemble connected by a continuous stone string course, creating a kind of architectural necklace running around the east and south sides of the house.

The principal features of the entrance facade are the single leaf, faux-grained, eight-paneled entrance door, capped by an elliptical fanlite, and flanked by four fluted pilasters. On the floor above, a light and elegant iron balcony with bowed, elliptical projections bearing the monogram “NR”, spans the full three-bay width of the facade.

The principal feature of the south side is the four-sided polygonal bay rising the full height of the house. A second balcony, as light and elegant as the first (but lacking the monograms), wraps around the bay, emphasizing the preeminence of the second story.

An elaborate tripartite window dominates the north facade, seemingly random in location, but carefully placed to sit indoors between landings of the house’s elliptical staircase. [10]

The house is 9,600 square feet (890 m²)[11] with 6,000 square feet (560 m²) of living area.

Elliptical spiral staircase, which ascends three floors

The interior of the Nathaniel Russell house is an exemplar of the neoclassical style (often called Federal style in the United States; late-Georgian or Adam style in Great Britain; and Louis Seize in France), popular during the last two decades of the 18th century and the first two of the 19th. Neoclassical architects and craftsmen introduced curved walls, elaborate plaster decorations and striking mixed color schemes. The house features three main rooms per floor each of different geometric designs: a front rectangular room, a center oval room, and a square room in the rear.[5]

The rectangular entrance hall with a black and white diamond patterned floorcloth edged with a leaf motif, and the adjacent office was where Russell would conduct business. Separating the public rooms at the front of the house from the more private rooms used by the family, wide faux-grained double doors with glazed rosette patterned insets and an elliptical fan shaped transom, gives access to the golden walled stair hall that showcases the most important architectural feature of the house, the cantilevered spiral staircase, that ascends to the third floor. The asymmetrical hall is illuminated by a Palladian window, and further ornamented with trompe-l'œil painting resembling a plaster cornice and an elliptical medallion that were painted by Charleston artisan Samuel O'Hara. Off the central stair hall is the oval dining room, with turquoise walls that appear painted, but are small squares of unpatterned wallpaper bordered with interlocking rings, in red and gold, above cypress wainscoting painted white.[10] The heart-pine floors and the wood interior shutters are original. At the rear of the house is a square parlor, that was enlarged at a later date to connect the house with the kitchen, and was used by the family for everyday dining.

The second-floor oval drawing room is the most highly decorated room in the house and is where the women of the house retired to after dinner. Papered in apricot, it features elaborate plaster moldings covered with 24-karat gold leaf and plinth blocks at the base painted to resemble lapis lazuli. The Adamesque ornamentation of the fireplaces' mantles and cornices are among the most detailed in the city.[12] The curved entry doors are faux-grained to resemble flame-grained mahogany on the exterior and tortoise shell on the interior. Curved mullioned mirrors on one side of the room balance the windows to provide symmetry and reflect light in the room.[10]

The large rectangular withdrawing room found at the front of the house has soft gray walls and white wainscoting that offset the multilayered gilded cornice molding. The windows are surrounded with tall slender pilasters and overhanging entablatures, that add dimension to the walls. With windows on three sides, the room was utilized primarily during the day to take advantage of the daylight and breezes. At the rear of the house is the square shaped master bedroom, and additional bedchambers are found on the third floor.[10] Though most of the art and furniture displayed in the house are not original to the Nathaniel Russell House, they are of the correct time period for when the Russell family inhabited the house, and many are of Charleston origin.

Nathaniel Russell House Slave Quarters

The house and grounds are separated from the street by a brick and wrought iron fence with the entrance gate flanked by tall brick columns capped with stone ball finials. To the south of the house is the garden that was originally laid out in a geometric arrangement with patterned beds of flowers, ornamental shrubs and large orange and grapefruit trees.[13] Today a formal English garden can be found with gravel paths, boxwood hedges and plants favored in the 19th century. In the rear of the house is the two-story slave quarters that housed many of the estimated 18 slaves that were at the Nathaniel Russell House.