Adelaide Nichols Baker “Lower Guard Hill”

82 Clinton Avenue, Westport, CT

1924-25 | Residence | Extant

This was Minerva’s own house, designed for herself and her daughter/son-in-law when Minerva was a widow. A few years later, she designed the house up the hill at 78 Clinton Avenue for Adelaide and her husband Jack. Mother and daughter lived side-by-side until Minerva’s death in 1949.

Although Minerva advertised a project for herself over three decades earlier (the 1890 published notice for a house in Oak Lane for “self”), the earlier house was never built. She designed alterations to a pre-existing farmhouse that the family used as a summer home, and no doubt other homes that the family moved into—but most of those houses were rented, and none of them were original designs by Minerva. That would make this house in Westport the first home Minerva designed in full, for herself—after a lifetime of creating homes for others.