William Whitney Lewis (1850-1933) was born in Manchester, England and came to the United States at an early age. Lewis attended MIT and began working at the Boston architectural firm of Cummings & Sears in 1868. In 1876, he formed his own practice, designing many residences in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood and a large number of homes along the coast including in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Lewis also designed commercial and educational buildings including the Sears Laboratory at Harvard Medical School (ca. 1890).
In Lowell, Lewis designed the community’s most outstanding Shingle style residence, the John Faulkner House (1887, 32 Belmont Avenue) and the city’s only Richardsonian Romanesque style residence, the Frederick Faulkner House (1890, 86 Belmont Avenue).