On the southeast corner of Prospect and Angell Streets, your Corliss–Brackett House, also called the Charles Brackett House, rises in stone as a deliberate monumental statement. Built between 1875 and 1882 by George Henry Corliss, inventor of the Corliss Steam Engine, this house keeps its original exterior appearance and reads like a deliberate, monumental statement in stone. It rises three full stories above a low basement, while a tower in the northwest corner climbs another story higher.
A two-story service wing stretches to the east and at street level is separated by a tunnel-like porte-cochère, a carriage passage that frames the house’s service side. The style is explicitly Italian Villa, the picturesque form that emerged in the United States in the 1840s, and as observers have noted the building is slightly retardataire — a later, very formal masonry example of that Tuscan-inspired mode. Corliss built it in part during a period when his second wife, Emily Shaw, suffered an illness for which a doctor recommended she spend winters in Bermuda.
Notice the tower above, then picture the service wing and the porte-cochère at street level to the east.