Merchant Horace L. Kent commissioned Boston architect Isaiah Rogers in 1844 to design this Franklin Street mansion. Most of Rogers’s works have been destroyed; 12 East Franklin Street is his only surviving residential design. The house was originally a three-bay Italianate dwelling skirted by an intricate cast-iron veranda. In 1904 Granville G. Valentine, owner of a meat extract company, engaged the firm of Noland and Baskervill to expand the house into a five-bay composition, extending the veranda. The veranda was replaced by the present Ionic portico around 1909. The final result is a successful amalgam of antebellum and early-20th-century styles. Noland and Baskervill’s Georgian Revival drawing room provides an interesting contrast to Rogers’s Gothic Revival double parlors. The Kent-Valentine House was restored in the early 1970s to serve as the headquarters of the Garden Club of Virginia, and it is located in Richmond’s East Franklin Street Historic District.