Musicologist Mariana Whitmer and her husband, bank executive George Whitmer, have lived there happily since the summer of 1991.

But the house at 838 N. Lincoln Ave. in Allegheny West has seen its share of strife, including the divorce of its first occupants and an apparent suicide in the family of the second.

One room wide and four rooms deep, 838 N. Lincoln was a townhouse among mansions when it was built in 1889, the year after H.H. Richardson's Allegheny County Courthouse was completed. To give the three-story house presence, architects Longfellow, Alden and Harlow designed a stone façade in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, adapting features of grander houses to a smaller scale.

The house is one of six private homes on this year's Old Allegheny Victorian Christmas House Tour, to be held Dec. 11 and 12. Four of them are on North Lincoln and Beech avenues, including that of PG columnist Brian O'Neill and his wife, Betsy.

The Whitmers' house is known as the Joseph O. and Elizabeth Horne House, named for the son of department store founder Joseph Horne and his wife. But an 1890 map shows the building and grounds were owned by the younger Horne's father-in-law, steel manufacturer Benjamin Franklin Jones, indicating he was the paying client.

Mr. Jones then lived just a few houses away at the corner of North Lincoln and Irwin Avenue (now Brighton Road), next to a large brick and stone house the architects, two of whom had worked for Mr. Richardson, completed in 1887 for Augustus Painter. Next to the Painter house were two of the firm's other houses designed for Lewis Irwin, the smaller of which he was then renting to one of its designers, Frank Alden.

Like so many Allegheny City mansions, the Painter house eventually met the wrecking ball, but in its day it was Longfellow, Alden and Harlow's showplace here, wrote Margaret Henderson Floyd in "Architecture after Richardson," her 1994 book about the firm. The Horne house, an elegant blend of medievalism and classicism, has some of the same elements that distinguished the Painter house, she wrote, including the use of both dressed and rusticated stone on the façade and decorative wrought iron in the strap hinges and window grille of the heavy oak front door.

Elizabeth Jones had married Joseph O. Horne by 1884, the first year city directories show the couple living in her father's house. Adelaide Nevin, in her 1888 book "The Social Mirror," describes Bessie Horne as "slight and very graceful. Her small, shapely head has a regal poise, and her brown hair, dark brown eyes, brunette coloring and clear-cut features form a very pretty face."

Joseph O. Horne, who worked at his father's store, was active in local politics, serving on Allegheny City's Common and Select councils throughout the 1890s.

But by 1900, Joseph and Bessie had divorced. With the family business in the hands of his older brother, Joseph left Pittsburgh and moved to New York, where he died of pneumonia at age 47 in 1906. A brief obituary in the Pittsburgh Bulletin describes him as a patron of music and art, but gives no occupation.

Bessie remained the mistress of 838 N. Lincoln, living there in 1900 with their three children, ages 6, 4 and 1. As a woman of means, she had plenty of live-in help ­-- from a cook, waitress, chambermaid and laundress, as well as two nurses for the children.

The house still has the rear staircase built for the servants' use, now far quieter than in those days. Mrs. Whitmer sometimes uses it to travel between the kitchen and her third-floor office.

The house's plan is an unusual one, with the architects creating something of the effect of a great hall and grand staircase in a middle room. The home's front door opens into a vestibule and narrow side hall. To the immediate right is a bright, airy parlor decorated in a light classicism and illuminated by a crystal chandelier and a large window with leaded glass fanlight.

It was that window, set in the stone facade, that first attracted Mrs. Whitmer on one of her runs through the neighborhood, when they lived in the adjacent Mexican War Streets.

Straight ahead, at the end of the narrow hall, is what Mrs. Floyd called the "sitting room," although the Whitmers keep it sparely furnished, emphasizing the carved oak mantel and the oak staircase. Its lower steps and end paneling were re-created by Joedda Sampson when she returned the building from apartment house to single-family use in the late 1980s. Slots in the paneling indicated where the original steps had been before the staircase was rerouted to face the narrow hall when the building was an apartment house.

By 1913, with the Hornes' move to Sewickley, the house had new occupants -- Henry B. Darlington and his wife Constance Alden, daughter of Frank Alden, who had died in 1908. The couple, who announced their engagement in May 1910, married the following month; in March 1911 their son, Henry Jr., was born.

A 1906 Princeton grad whose college nickname was Dolly, Henry in 1912 was assistant treasurer of the Union Spring Manufacturing Co., which made railway equipment. A Princeton publication that year reports that tennis and golf were his sports, his family was his special interest and he was happy in his work and hoped to hang onto to it "to the end of his days."

The end came just three years later, on Nov. 14, 1915. Mrs. Darlington reported hearing a gunshot at 2 a.m. from her husband's locked bedroom and ran to get one of his relatives, Harry Darlington, who lived nearby. He broke into the room.

"A revolver lay near [Henry]," The Pittsburgh Press reported. "A small lamp was burning on the table, and a book was open near it."

Alas, no record of what he was reading. He was 32.

Seven months later, Mrs. Darlington married James Erwin Jr., who adopted her son. They moved to Mr. Erwin's native California, where they ran a mountain resort hotel in the Big Bear Valley. The couple had a daughter, also named Constance, in 1918.

By then, city directories indicate, 838 had become a rooming or apartment house.

All the more surprising then, that it retains its many grace notes. The classical wreath in the façade's roof gable is repeated in the living room mantel and the dining room's stained glass windows. When the Whitmers replaced the vestibule's tile floor, they had it set in there, too.

From the dining room, a butler's pantry with the home's original walk-in safe leads to the kitchen, which retains its bead-board wainscot, stenciling and porcelain tile behind the stove.

Only the house's first-floor rooms, decorated for the holidays by staffers from Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, will be on the tour. They should be something to see.

Doug Oster writes a blog, "Growing With Doug," exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.