Old House Styles

Old House Styles

Gothic Revival & Carpenter Gothic Houses

While a Gothic vocabulary is relevant to many American styles, a full-blown Gothic Revival took hold in mid-19th-century America.

Old House Styles

Shingle Style Victorian Architecture and History of Shingle Style Homes

A rarefied style in the 19th century, the Victorian-era Shingle Style is one beloved today. Architects cherish its grand informality, Colonial Revivalists appreciate its simple forms and classical allusions, and neo-Victorians exult in its embrace of Islamic and Japanese forms alongside Georgian. It is, as Vincent Scully put it, “the architecture of the American summer.”

Old House Styles

Modern Gothic Houses & Eastlake Interiors

Gothic interiors were marked by bold design.

Old House Styles

Stick Style Architecture & Interiors

A celebration of timber construction, Victorian-era Stick Style houses are the culmination of a tradition that began in the 1840s with the picturesque movement.

Old House Styles

Arts & Crafts Architecture and How To Spot Arts & Crafts Homes

Informal yet eminently cultured, the Arts & Crafts movement served to influence a range of house styles that still grace the architecture. Here are ways to spot an Arts & Crafts home.

Old House Styles

Bungalows of the Arts & Crafts Movement

Artistic naturalism in the architecture and design of the Arts & Crafts bungalow.

Old House Styles

American Foursquare Architecture & Interiors

The epitome of the post-Victorian “comfortable house,” the Foursquare is about dignified self-containment.

Old House Styles

Prairie Homes & Prairie School Architecture

Lowered ceilings, open planning, indirect lighting—all these can be traced to modern, American style Prairie homes.

Old House Styles

Early Colonial Revival Architecture

The English Colonial Revival, which resulted in a national architectural vocabulary, was a movement with roots in Victorian-era Boston and Philadelphia.

Old House Styles

Colonial Revival Interior Design

Colonial interiors are characterized by grand entrance halls, polished wood floors, simplified paint and wallpaper palettes, and light approach to millwork and wainscoting.

Old House Styles

The Mansard Roof and Second Empire Style

A look at the origins and history of the mansard roof in Second Empire style houses and historical buildings.

Old House Styles

Study of Stick Style Architecture and History

The Stick style, as it is now called, represented the most innovative design concepts and building technologies of its time, yet it did not attract serious study—or even a widely accepted name—until a century later.

Old House Styles

The I House in Rural America

Old House Styles

The Architectural Influences of Greene & Greene

When a twist of fate landed architect brothers Charles and Henry Greene in California, they seized upon the state’s burgeoning identity to create a new brand of architecture and design.

Old House Styles

Beaux Arts: A Capital Idea

The Beaux-Arts style, also called the American Renaissance, is about as formal as architecture can get.