The west (front) facade has four bays on the first floor behind a wraparound veranda and three on the second. Projecting bays at the rear of either side have smaller gambrel roofs. It is sided in clapboard to the roofline, then in shingles within the gambrels, except in the rear where the clapboard continues to the top. All the gambrels contain one window, with the west facade's Palladian-style one being the most elaborate.
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The Gustov C. Lerch House was designed in a combination of the Shingle and Colonial Revival styles. The house is distinguished by its cross gambrels and the variety of surface textures that were employed in its construction. The foundation is composed of quarry-faced stone, the main level is composed of tan brick with segmented widow arches and corners in dark, rock-faced brick. The upper level is composed of gambrels that are covered in narrow clapboard.
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The west side has a centrally located secondary entrance. Next to it on the north are three more of the nine-pane casement windows. On the upper level, both of the front gambrels have two more nine- over-nine sash windows. A Palladian window is set in the center of the west apex.
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This latter residence is actually an even rarer example of a half-gambrel roof with the original dormer window. Exceedingly few of these structures remain in the former colonies, let alone Philadelphia. Other half-gambrels can be seen at The Man Full of Trouble Tavern (1759), Drinker’s Court (1756), Bell’s Court (c. 1810), part of Bridget Foy’s roof, and behind the Nicholas Biddle (banker) House south of Washington Square (Philadelphia).
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Gambrel is a Norman English word, sometimes spelled gambol such as in the 1774 Boston carpenters' price book (revised 1800). Other spellings include gamerel, gamrel, gambril, gameral, gambering, cambrel, cambering, chambrelA New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly ..., Volume 4. p. 36. referring to a wooden bar used by butchers to hang the carcasses of slaughtered animals. Butcher's gambrels, later made of metal, resembled the two-sloped appearance of a gambrel roof when in use.
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A significant difference between the two, for snow loading and water drainage, is that, when seen from above, gambrel roofs culminate in a long, sharp point at the main roof beam, whereas mansard roofs always form a low-pitched roof. In France and Germany, no distinction is made between gambrels and mansards – they are both called "mansards". In the French language, mansarde can be a term for the style of roof, or for the garret living space, or attic, directly within it. A cross- sectional diagram of a timber-framed Mansard roof; each of its four faces has the same profile.
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An architectural hybrid of Colonial Revival and the Shingle Style featuring Palladian windows, gambrels, peaked dormers and a balconied front porch with Ionic columns, the ARU house was built between 1894 and 1900 as the residence of George Taylor and Edith Davis Files. An 1889 Bowdoin graduate, George Files was a German professor at the college until his death in 1919 upon returning from France, where he had helped the YMCA with the war effort. In 1921, Mrs. Files endowed the George Taylor Files Professorship in Modern Languages at Bowdoin and sold their house to Sigma Nu, who in turn sold it to ARU in 1951 upon relocating to the college's present Hartley Cone Baxter House.
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Though sited away from the street frontage and church, the Manse maintains important links to both, visually and functionally. The main west elevation features the asymmetrical layout, massing and formal elements typical of its style including a broad-spreading slated hip roof with terracotta ridging and small ventilator gambrels, a gable-roofed projecting wing with rectangular bay window expressing the presence and importance of the main living room, a smaller gable-roofed porch breaking the line of the verandah roof to mark the entrance with its decorative cut-out frieze and brackets (understood traditionally to represent the Trinity and thus point to the ecclesiastical context of the building). The front verandah, under the slated main roof, continues around the north-west corner to line the front half of the north elevation 'm a manner typical of the Federation style and to provide sheltered access to the Minister's study. The verandah roof is supported on squat timber posts supported on a brick balustrade.
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