The Anton Goreczky House is a Queen-Anne style one-and-one-half-story wood structure with a sandstone foundation, featuring an unusually elaborate porch and gable details. The house is located on a corner lot of block 27 in the Resseguie Addition of Boise's North End neighborhood. Built in 1898, the house has a front-gable roof with a lower cross gable roof, forming a south facing T-shaped plan. A one-story kitchen with a gable roof is located at the back of the house. Two entry porches with secondary dropped roofs are inset on both sides of the T. The front wrap-around porch includes a corner entry with a cantilevered gable dormer that forms a pediment with incised decorative patterns. Large wooden brackets with delicate incised patterns support the dormer. The porch is supported by turned porch posts and elongated vertical decorative wood brackets. Between the porch posts, an inventive series of turned spindle knobs and balls forms simple curved wood arches and lace-like spandrels. A decorative balustrade encloses the porch. The porch is unusually elaborate for the size and style of the house. It contributes to the unique character of the house and is a testimony to the taste and business acumen by its owner, Anton Goreczky.
A second porch, which extends across the kitchen facade, is lower and lacks the detailed spindlework, brackets, and balustrade of the front porch. This porch also has a gable-dormer corner entry.
The front gable has a handsome Stick Style bracket shaped like a Kings post with a delicate incised pattern. The cross gable has an intricate lace-like spindlework gable bracket. The gable spaces are covered with patterned shingles in round, half cove, and plain shapes. The first-floor siding is horizontal shiplap. The cross gable's upper-story gable, typical of the Queen Anne style, overhangs a cutaway bay window. Both the overhang and the bay window are supported by decorative wooden brackets.
The windows are double-hung sash. Those on the second floor have blank lower panes and patterned upper panes separated by vertical and small triangular muntins. The bay window has clear transom windows, which may originally have been stained glass. The existing doors are paneled and rather plain, indicating that they may have been replaced when the house interior was remodeled in the 1920"s. The house's interior consists of eight rooms, all with fine woodwork. The dining-room woodwork and some of the other interior trim was altered in the 1920's to resemble the simpler Craftsman style. Two delicate fret pieces still accentuate the dining room. The exterior of the house remains in its original state.
A two-story garage was formerly located on the lot adjacent to the alley. This simple frame building burned in the 1970's.
The Anton Goreczky House is architecturally significant as an example of the Queen Anne style with unusually elaborate porch and gable detailing. Though modest in size, the 1898 house features some of the most ornate Queen Anne decorative wood brackets and spindlework found locally. Noteworthy features include the front porch's spindlework, turned posts, and brackets, the fortyfive degree porch entrance cantilevered by large wooden brackets, and the porch gable dormer with its incised decorative patterns. The house is historically significant for its association with an early Boise entrepreneur and his business. The owner and contractor of the house was Anton Goreczky, a contractor and partner with Joseph Scheloske in a planing mill. In selecting the decorative trim for his own residence, Goreczky probably utilized pattern books and catalogues common at the time. The house's elaborate gingerbread may well have been intended to demonstrate to the local community what could be accomplished by decorative detailing, and therefore served as useful advertising for his business.
Born June 8, 1861, near Vienna, Austria, Anton Goreczky left home when thirteen years of age. He apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker and proceeded to journeyman status, visiting the principal cities of Europe and educating himself in night schools. He came to the United States in the summer of 1878 and worked as a cabinetmaker in Calumet County, Wisconsin, and in Colorado.
Goreczky came to Boise in February 1891, and began his contracting business. He constructed many of the Boise business blocks and residences and was so successful that after a little more than two years he built a planing mill, located at Front and South Eighth streets. In 1901 fire destroyed his entire plant. The next year he built a new and thoroughly equipped plant, later called the Boise Sash and Door Factory, which served the city for many years, as a supplier of sash, door, screens, bracket turnings, mouldings, and dressed lumber of all kinds to the growing region. Its two-story 50-by-100-foot brick building was located on South Eighth Street; the mill yard covered nearly an entire city block and had railroad switching facilities for shipping. This plant supplied Boise's sash and door needs up until the 1950's. Some of the machinery from the original plant is still used today at Wood Products Company of Boise.
Goreczky died February 13, 1934. He still resided in this house at the time of his death.
Adapted from: John Bertram, City Planner, Planmakers, Anton Goreczky House, 1985, nomination document, National Register of Historic Places, accessed October, 2021.
Nearby Neighborhoods
Street Names
7th Street North