Bourbon Trail|Fenced Yard|Walk|Free Parking|Slps12

Welcome to The Twins, our charming duo of renovated shotgun houses. The homes have been fully renovated and have identical interior layouts and finishes. They share a privately fenced back yard with a patio, firepit and free off-street parking. The historic Clifton neighborhood location offers quick access to the Downtown Bourbon Trail, NuLu, Riverfront Park and is within walking distance to multiple restaurants and bars. The space The Twins can accommodate up to 12 guest in FOUR spacious bedrooms along with two sleeper sofas. The homes were fully renovated in 2023. They are filled will natural light, providing a cheerful and bright space. They share a spacious brick patio with seating and firepit, and the back yard has a privacy fence. There is both off-street parking behind the homes and free on-street parking. The homes are also available individually for groups of 6 or smaller. In its most basic form, the shotgun cottage is a one-story, rectangular structure, only one room wide (usually 12' to 15' in width) and three or four rooms deep. Constructed without any hallways, the rooms are lined up, one behind the other. Typically, the living room is the first room at the front with a bedroom behind, followed by a kitchen. With all of the doors in a straight line, a person could stand at the front door and shoot a gun straight through the house and out the back door without hitting anything. That's one explanation of why they're called shotgun houses. Most of Louisville's shotgun cottages were built in the period between the end of the Civil War and 1910. Louisville has the largest collection of Shotgun houses in the entire country. Believed to be first built in the U.S. in Louisiana by free Haitians because of the compact lot size required, the shotgun house design may have been brought to Louisville by French fur traders. They are a special and unique vernacular architecture to Louisville. The shotgun houses were erected to provide shelter for the workers in a way that rowhouses were erected in eastern U.S. cities. The shotguns, however, afforded a greater sense of privacy and separateness than rowhouses and cut down on the wild spread of fires. Shotguns are organized along a block in a delicate manner which allows maximum privacy despite the narrow lots. The side entrance of one cottage does not abut that of its neighbor and neither's windows are placed so as to encourage peering. In fact, typically, one side of a house will be windowless facing the windowed side of the next house. A definite neighborhood image is created by a series of shotguns. Because the houses all have the same setback from the street, the same height at the front, and regular spacing down the block, a coherent "blockscape" is created. The cumulative effect of repetitive forms gives a pleasant, small-town sense to the block. Oral tradition has it that the name “shotgun” for the rectangular cottage is derived from the fact that a person could stand at the front door and shoot a gun the length of the building and out the back door without piercing a wall. University of Maryland faculty member and folklorist John Michael Vlach thinks a proper etymology lies elsewhere. Vlach postulates that the word originated with a Western African tribe whose word for house was to-gun, literally, “place of assembly.” The word may have been carried along with the cottage style into slavery with its builders. The land on which these two houses are located was part of the estate of Charles Pope. Charles was the grandson of Col. William Pope who was one of the original trustees appointed by the Virginia Legislature to establish Louisville in the 1700s. The Pope family owned a lot of real estate in this area, which is why William and Pope Streets are named in Col. Pope’s honor. Captain Joshua B. Bowles then acquires the property as well as several others to subdivide for development. Bowles was one of the earliest and most influential settlers in this area. As a gentleman farmer, he built an estate named Clifton, which is no longer standing. If it were, it would be located on Frankfort Avenue. Bowles then subdivided his land for development. The parcel was sold by Bowles to Alex and August Knapp who then sold it to Henry Humbert in 1882. Humbert then sold it to Charles Stoecker in 1890 whose family who had these houses erected. Charles Stoecker was a native of Germany, lived on Story Avenue, and established a tannery called Karl Stoecker Tannery on Stoecker Avenue in the Butchertown Neighborhood. These two homes are historically and architecturally significant for their association with the development of workforce housing as well as their shotgun house form. The houses were built circa 1905 and had different addresses. Brownsboro Road was previously called Letterle Avenue. Each of the houses appear to be built for workforce, rental housing. No members of the Stoecker family appeared to ever live there. Around 1925, Letterle Avenue was renamed Brownsboro Road. Guest access Our guests have access to both houses and the back yard. Registration Details LIC-STA-23-00850