AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Smith-Giltinan House is a magnificent three-story Queen Anne mansion on Charleston's East Side, built around 1888 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Set on a spacious, beautifully landscaped lot at the corner of Virginia Street East and Morris Street, this buff-brick landmark dazzles with its polygonal turret, wraparound porch, projecting bays, and an extraordinary array of leaded and stained glass windows.↗↗↗
Today the house serves as elegant professional offices and a private events venue, so visitors mainly admire its extraordinary exterior from the street and sidewalk. For architecture lovers walking Charleston's historic neighborhoods, it is an unmissable stop—a textbook example of late Victorian ambition rendered in brick, stone, and wood.↗↗
A Queen Anne Masterpiece
Nothing about the Smith-Giltinan House is restrained. Built circa 1888 by an unknown architect, the house throws every late-Victorian trick at once: an asymmetrical six-by-six-bay plan crowned by a steeply pitched hip roof, a polygonal turret on the north face with a pointed shingled cap, projecting three-story bays on the east, three-sided bays on the south and west, and a full two-story porch with round Corinthian columns sweeping around the tower. The facade is laid in warm buff Roman brick with mortar tinted red, set on a massive cut-sandstone foundation and water table.
