The owner of the orchard and property along Orchard Way purportedly built the Chester County Hunt House, along with its neighbor next door, as a weekend lodge for visiting guests from the city of Philadelphia. The main house of this estate still stands upon the hill, across Orchard Way.

The house is built in the Dutch Colonial Revival style, popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Dutch Colonial Revival is not a style unique in itself but is a subtype of the Colonial Revival style, which was extremely popular after the first centennial of the American Revolution in 1876 when a new awareness of traditional architectural forms appeared across the US. Of the many forms of the Colonial Revival style, the Dutch cottage variant is among the most distinctive. Adapted from eighteenth century farmhouses erected by Dutch settlers, the defining characteristic of the style is a gambrel roof that was introduced to America by the Dutch in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. Traditionally, the homes were made of clapboard or shingles and had a side-entry door plan. More elaborate homes often have a gambrel-roofed cross-gable as well, as this house does.

The current owners undertook an extensive renovation project three years ago. They retained Peter Zimmerman Architects to maintain the architectural integrity and character of the house as a country lodge. A previously porch-converted kitchen was torn down and replaced with a gourmet kitchen with open beams using mortise and tenon, red oak trusses. The fireplace in the new family room was built to mimic the existing living room fireplace using stones reclaimed from an old retaining wall in an abandoned property once belonging to the current owner’s grandfather in what is now Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. Extensive changes were also made to the outdoor spaces and gardens at the time.

During the renovation, newspapers from 1911 were found within the walls. In addition, a children’s height chart from the 1930s was uncovered while scraping paint in the passageway between the current living and dining rooms. Further, the calling card of tradesman “John L. Brooke, Wayne, PA, May 24th, 1953” was discovered written in pencil on an old cedar shingle. In keeping with the tradition of tradesmen leaving their calling cards, the current owner and son of a plumber, has stashed messages inside the walls for future generations yet to come.