Poulsen, Johan, House

About this property

The Johan Poulsen House is a three-story American Queen Anne Style mansion in Portland, Oregon's Brooklyn neighborhood. It was built in 1892 by an unknown architect. Poulsen bought the property in July 1890 for $3,000, and the house was completed in August 1892. Poulsen sold the house immediately to S. B. Willey, probably either due to financial issues caused by the lead-up to the Panic of 1893 or because his wife, Dora, did not like it. He sold it on a mortgage to Willey and sold it outright to Arthur Zwicker for $7,500 on July 14, 1894. Alternately, the home was sold to William J. Clemens, an Oregon senator, in 1902. The house was built in 1892. The turret reaches approximately 50 feet. It includes a bedroom on the first floor for a servant. It contains two lead glass Oriel windows, a Palladian window, curved glass in the turret, and beveled lead glass windows. The home also contains a veranda, added around 1915. It is considered a "Pacific Northwest interpretation of the Queen Anne Style", since it does not contain stone or brick. The interior features a large carved oak fireplace and mantel, carved stairway balustrades, and oak flooring with a mahogany border. Containing nine bedrooms and 12-foot ceilings, the maid's bedroom is on the first floor, with four bedrooms on each of the second and third floors. The third floor may have originally been a large ballroom. The home was bought by "The Doughnut King", A. A. Hoover, in 1919, and became known as the "King's Castle" or "The King's Palace". The property was then sold to Henrietta B. Huthman in 1923, whose family owned it until 1946. The Huthman family added the two-car garage and large retaining wall in 1926. The two-car garage was connected to the house via tunnel. The home was converted to a boarding house sometime between 1946 and 1976. James F. Nevin purchased the house in approximately 1976 and began restoring it. The house was surveyed by the Portland Historical Landmarks Commission on October 3, 1973, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 14, 1977. In 2017, the Poulsen House was purchased as a home for Prospect, a Portland communications, design, government relations, & digital media agency. Prospect sold the house in 2019 to an investor from Seattle who renovated the interior of the property and added a new roof. He sold it to its current owner, Charlene Quaresma in September 2020. June of 2021, Quaresma recharacterized the property for commercial use to run her financial planning practice, House of Q Wealth Management. In 2026, a large renovation project was competed to restore the open turret on the west-end of the building due to decades of deferred maintenance. Though she was able to preserve 95% of the original wood in the turret, the weathervane could not be saved and was replaced with a custom cooper spire, topped with an ametrine crystal.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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