The architect Frank Furness was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1839. He worked as a draughtsman in the Philadelphia office of John Fraser, after which he studied at the New York atelier of Richard Morris Hunt (1859-61). He set up professional practices with a series of different partners starting in 1867. Furness never had the opportunity to travel abroad so his style, although influenced by Ruskin and Viollet-le-duc, achieved an originality that might have been impossible with first hand experience of European architecture. Eclectic and boldly polychromatic, his buildings were often dramatically over-scaled and boldly articulated with a variety of sculptural forms and materials. . . . Furness died in Medea, Pennsylvania in 1912.(1)

Furness designed The Emlen Physick House, a notable example of Stick Style architecture, in 1879. A Stick Style house features clapboard siding decorated with exposed beams, studs, or diagonal cross braces. The entire structure has an angular appearance, with horizontal and vertical dormers, overhanging eaves, large casement windows, large but simple corner posts, brackets, and railings. Frank Furnesss Emlen Physick House exemplifies Stick Style Architecture.

(1)Great Buildings web site (see link below).

The Emlen Physick House can be found at 1048 Washington Street in Cape May, the United States' oldest seaside resort. Cape May is also considered New Jerseys most haunted city. The Physick House now houses the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts (see link below).

Lynda Lee Macken, Ghosts of the Garden State (Forked River: Black Cat Press, 2001).

Anne Biddle Pratt, The Elmen Physick House Museum (Fletcher: CAM-TECH Publishing, 1990).

Vincent J. Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).