Victorian Home Styles
There were multiple Victorian styles that spread across the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Second Empire and Romanesque Revival designs—with their remarkable mansard roofs—Italianate and Queen Anne were popular and widespread. Most of these styles borrowed heavily from one another, and many houses that we call Victorian today are really a combination of a number of specific house designs.
Italianate Style 1840-1890
In the middle of the nineteenth century, interest grew in various Italian architecture styles—especially Italianate, Villa, and Renaissance Revival. Of these, the most popular was the Italianate style, probably because it was the easiest of the three to build. Also, many of the details that are representative of the style could be appropriately added to other simple house styles.
Italianate houses are two- or three-story square boxes with low-pitched hipped roofs. Very wide overhangs are standard and are supported with thick ornate brackets, sometimes installed in pairs. Occasionally, these ornamental brackets were replaced with large dentils.
Cupolas were very popular and were of standard pattern-book fare. They added interest to otherwise bland roofs, and in warmer climates they provided excellent ventilation. When the windows in the cupola and the house below were open, even a gentle breeze could pull out the warm air from inside the house.
Double-hung windows were the most common and tended to be narrow and high, usually with arched or curved tops. Their placement was symmetrical on all elevations, aligning horizontally and vertically with other windows and entrance doors. In brick and stucco models, the windows were topped with keystone arches. On some houses, small awning windows were placed between eave brackets and aligned with the windows on the two stories beneath them.
Porch Designs. The front elevation of an Italianate house often had an entry porch, usually the full width of the building. The support columns, railings, and stairs were less ornate during the first few decades of this style, but became more ornamented as the years went by. The entrance doors took design cues from the windows. Double doors were very popular, and they often had large panes of glass on their upper halves. If the windows had arched tops, so did the doors.
Queen Anne Style
Queen Anne Style (1860-1910)
Queen Anne designs were also extremely popular during the Victorian period, and wonderful examples can be found on the East and West coast and nearly every place in between. One reason for this popularity was the mail-order availability of the Queen Anne-style designs. Even though these structures were complicated, all of the parts could be precut and shipped by rail.
Distinctive Elements. Queen Anne-style houses were large, old structures that had numerous angles. The roofs were made up of a cacophony of steep gables and hips, wide overhangs, and dormers. Walls in this particular style were loaded with entry porches, towers, bay windows, and prominent chimneys. Building materials similarly varied; wood clapboards, cedar shingles, brick, stone, and stucco were all used—often in a single structure.
Large, inner-city models were more characteristic of the Queen Anne style; however, smaller houses of this fashion sprung up in rural areas, in tight urban plots, and in practically every small town in the country. These versions had less complicated roofs, fewer material textures, no towers, and a single bay window instead of four or five.
Windows were large pane, double-hung models. In expensive houses, stained glass was used as a design accent in some of the sashes, particularly in windows on the first floor. Often, entry doors had large panes of glass of etched or frosted glass in place of standard, wood panels.
Color Dominates. With the emergence of the Victorian era came a forceful goodbye to the Greek Revival-style stark white house. Instead, bright colors prevailed. It was common to have six or seven different colored paints on a large Queen Anne. Another common decorative element was the use of spindles on the outside of the house. Porch columns and balusters were invariably turned into spindles, as were porch friezes (just below the ceilings) and gable decorations.
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