A full-length front porch supported by four massive Doric fluted columns distinguishes this serene Georgian Revival house of dark red brick.  It was completed in 1922 for Mr. Ambrose Rucker Parker on lot 29 of the revised plan for the Mt. Vernon Villa Land Company, which first began developing home sites in 1895—following the streetcar line stretching along West Main Street to Ballou Park.  Apparently while the house was under construction early in the 1920s, the Parker family lived next door in the neighboring brown cedar shake house at 287 West Main.

Long associated with one of the city’s premier furniture stores which began as Crumpecker and Chism over a century ago, Mr. Parker added his name to the firm under the style Clements, Chism and Parker, later Clements and Parker.  The latter store survived into the early 1980s at the corner of Main and Floyd in Hotel Danville (now Danville House).  With his wife and two sons, Mr. Parker lived here some four decades.  Following the death of his wife, the former Mary Wright, in 1956, Mr. Parker went to live with their son Rucker Parker on Hawthorne Drive, where he died at age 102.  With his death in 1981, the family home on West Main was sold to Robert and Patricia Malpass; who lived here for a decade.  Over the next 15 years four more families called 285 West Main Street home.

In 2005, Sandra Strange purchased the property.  A registered nurse, Sandra has enhanced formal neoclassicallv-inspired rooms and spacious layout upstairs and down with antiques and accessories from several generations of her family.  Prior to her watch, the handsome kitchen was refurbished about ten years ago.  Under her direction this past summer a now-inviting rear porch was enclosed.