The house was built as the residence and office of Dr. Horace Jayne and his wife Caroline Furness Jayne, and was completed in 1895. Dr. Jayne was a zoologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Mrs. Jayne, the architect's niece, was an ethnologist and an authority on string figures. Following her death at age 36, Dr. Jayne and their children - Kate Furness Jayne and Horace H. F. Jayne - moved year-round to "Sub Rosa," their summer house on the Wallingford, Pennsylvaniaproperty of her father, Horace Howard Furness. The city house was acquired by department-store heir Jacob Lit of Lit Brothers about 1928, who probably added the radiator covers of frolicking greyhounds by sculptor William Hunt Diederich. It was converted into a synagogue in the 1940s, and served as headquarters for the Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania from the 1950s to the 1980s. The building was renovated in the late 1980s into the law offices of Anapol, Schwartz, Weiss & Schwartz. It was sold in 2007, and underwent a 2-year restoration by John Milner, Architects. It is now, again, a single-family residence. Many of Furness's grandest Philadelphia houses of the 1880s and 1890s were built near or fronting on Rittenhouse Square. These included the William W. Frazier house, at the southwest corner of 18th & Rittenhouse Square Streets; the George B. Preston house, at the northeast corner of 22nd & Walnut Streets; the Thomas A. Scott house, at the southeast corner of 19th & Rittenhouse Square Streets; the Alexander J. Cassatt house, at 202 South 19th Street ; and the Thomas A. Reilly house, at 1804 Rittenhouse Square Street. Of these, only the Reilly house and the Jayne house survive.
Design
The eclectic building's design is highly unusual, and its volumes are articulated on the exterior. The facade is divided into two halves; a 3-1/2 story southern section that contained Dr. Jayne's offices - a ground-floor waiting room and an examination room above - and a 2-1/2 story northern section that contained the high-ceilinged formal rooms. The floor levels coincide on the upper stories. The main entrance is off-center in a slightly projected section, with an oval window and a bracket-supported Juliet balcony above. The Colonial Revival-detailed exterior is composed of red English sandstone and brick, and features terra cotta reliefs by sculptor Karl Bitter on the east, north and west façades and the pedimented dormers. Bitter also modeled the reliefs for Furness & Evans's contemporaneous Broad Street Station. The interior is remarkable. The formal rooms are located a half-story above the entrance. The 2-story central hall features a grand staircase on the south wall that wraps around the fireplace, a hanging gallery that traces the other three walls, and an intricate leaded glass skylight. A favorite visual pun of Furness's was to place a window above a fireplace, splitting the flues into the walls flanking it—as he did at Jefferson Medical College and the parish hall of First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. With the Jayne house's central hall he took his punning to an extreme, placing a curved balcony and a horseshoe-shaped seating area above the fireplace, and splitting the flues into piers that merged to form a soaring triumphal arch.
