Francis Harrington Glidden, a Navy veteran who’d apprenticed under an East Coast paint magnate, founded the Glidden Varnish Company in Cleveland in 1869, building it from a small operation making furniture and wagon varnish into a business producing nearly a thousand gallons a week within just a few years, thanks partly to a popular lacquer called jap-a-lac. His eldest son, Francis Kavanaugh Glidden, rose to senior vice president and, in 1910, built a French Gothic Eclectic mansion for his own family in Cleveland’s newly developing University Circle neighborhood, choosing the prestigious Magnolia Lane address over the property’s actual Ford Drive location at his wife Mary’s insistence.
Frank died in 1933, and Mary lived on in the house with her sister until her own death in 1939, after which their daughter Ida remained until she passed as well. Western Reserve University acquired the vacant mansion in the early 1950s, using it as the Psychology Department and later a Law School building, before it was restored and opened as a 60-room boutique hotel.