Brookline Hills Painters — Stanton Road, Lincoln Road & Cypress Street

Brookline Hills shares its name with the D-branch stop at Tappan and Cypress, and we found no official town boundary for it. What is documented are a handful of buildings the Brookline Historical Commission surveyed in 1980. Three of them are Italianate houses on Stanton Road and Lincoln Road, all with clapboard walls. The survey of 50 Stanton Road calls it one of four Italianate houses on the street, the others being 22 Stanton (also numbered 5 Lincoln Road), 25 and 44.

The dates are early for Brookline's suburbs. 5 Lincoln Road appears on an 1849 subdivision plan and was probably built about 1852; 50 Stanton dates from 1859–60 and 44 Stanton from 1864–65. The forms describe the same vocabulary repeated from house to house: deep eaves with double brackets, bracketed or heavily capped window heads, rounded windows, quoins, and bay windows of one or two stories.

These houses have also changed over time, and the paperwork says how. 5 Lincoln Road became a two-family in 1928 and got a dormer in 1939; it was identical to 25 Stanton until 1970s alterations. 44 Stanton was moved back from the street in 1901 and now sits about 85 feet behind Stanton Road on a land-locked lot reached by a private way. Down on Cypress Street, the brick Ritchie Building of 1883, built for an instrument maker, stands next to the MBTA tracks.

Bracket and cornice work is the slow part

Double brackets under a deep cornice mean many carved faces and shadowed undersides per elevation, each scraped and primed by hand. Quoins and capped window heads add more edges where old paint lifts first. On a house like this the eaves, more than the siding, tend to set the schedule.

Old clapboard, likely old lead

On clapboard houses built in the 1850s and 1860s, layers of lead paint should be assumed until a test says otherwise. In the census tract that contains Stanton and Lincoln Roads, 77.4% of housing units were built before 1980. Exterior scraping above 20 square feet falls under Massachusetts lead-safe renovation rules.

Two-family conversions and shared walls

In that tract, 38.8% of units are in two- to four-unit buildings, and at least one of the surveyed Italianates was split into two units decades ago. When a house has two owners, or an owner and a tenant, color choice, scheduling and access to a back stair need agreement before work starts.

Tight lots and private ways

The surveyed lots run from roughly 3,200 to 5,500 square feet, and one house is reached only by a private way. Ladder footing, staging and where a dumpster or truck can park are worth walking through on site, not guessing at from the street.