Take a stroll through the history of American houses, from the colonial era to the modern age.

American House Styles

Log Cabin
Dates: up to 1850s The earliest settler houses went up quickly, using the most abundant material around woodto protect against the harsh weather.

Saltbox
Dates: 1607 to early 1700s Most saltboxes existed in and around New England. Their steep roof pitch is a holdover from the days of thatching, but early settlers learned that wood shingles were better at sloughing off snow and rain.

Georgian
Dates: 1700 to 1780 American Georgian architecture is based on earlier European styles which emphasized classical Greek and Roman shapes. Georgian houses could be found in every part of the colonies in the 18th century.

Federal
Dates: 1780 to 1820 This was the first style of the newly formed United States, and it had a place in nearly every part of the countryparticularly in bustling urban areas like Salem, Massachusetts

Greek Revival
Dates: 1825 to 1860 Americans, newly enamored with Greek democracy, built civic buildings that looked like Greek temples. The fashion seeped into residential architecture as far as the most rural farmland, popularized through pattern.

Gothic Revival
Dates: 1840 to 1880 The Gothic Revival is another trend that started in England and made its way to the U.S. The style mimics the shapes found on Medieval churches and houses, and is almost always found in rural areas.

Italianate

Second Empire

Queen Ann

Dates: 1855 to 1885 Dates: 1880 to 1910 Dates: 1840 to 1885 The style name refers to France's second The Queen Anne stylewhat most people Modeled after a fashion started in England, empirethe reign of Napoleon III from would call "Victorian"is the first product of the Italianate style rejected the rigid rules of 1852 1870during which the mansard roof the American Industrial Age. classical architecture and instead looked to was in vogue the more informal look of Italian rural houses. See full article at: http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/photos/0,,1228909_1132066,00.html

Shingle
Dates: 1880 to 1900 A style mostly popular along the coast in the Northeast, Shingle houses were usually large architects' masterpieces, free-form mansions built into the rocks and hills of the shore.

Richardsonian Romanesque
Dates: 1880 to 1900 Closely related to the Queen Anne and Shingle styles, Romanesque houses are always stone or brick.

Folk Victorian
Dates: ca. 1870 to 1910 As the industrial age made machine-cut wood details affordable and available to the average American, homeowners added mass-produced decorative trim (called gingerbread) to their small, folk cottages.

Colonial Revival
Dates: 1880 to 1955 The American Centennial celebrations of 1876 brought about a nostalgia for the country's past, including its early house styles. This is one of the country's most enduring styles, as millions of examples survive, and a renewal of interest in it led to a Neo-Colonial Revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Cape Cod
Dates: 1920s to 1940s The Cape Cod cottage is a subset of the Colonial Revival style, most popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. It's modeled after the simple houses of colonial New England, though early examples were almost always shingled. Many houses of the post World War II building boom were Capes.

Neoclassical
Dates: 1895 to 1950 The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 featured a classical theme, sparking a renewed interest in Greek and Roman architecture. The style is closely related to Colonial Revival, as both look back on a time in American architecture when classical forms dominated.

Tudor Revival
Dates: 1890 to 1940 More Medieval than Tudor, the style's details loosely harken back to an early English form. Though the style began in the late 19th century, it was immensely popular in the growing suburbs of the 1920s. A version of Tudor came back into vogue in the late 20th century

French Revival
Dates: 1915 to 1945 American soldiers serving in France during World War I would have seen many houses with these characteristics in the French countryside. Like the Tudor Revival, which it resembles, the style was most popular in the growing suburbs of the 1920s.

Spanish Colonial Revival

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Pueblo Revival
Dates: 1910 to present Pueblo Revival houses have their roots in adobe houses built by Native Americans and Spanish colonial settlers in the Southwest. The style prevails in that part of the country, particularly in Arizona and New Mexico where originals survive.

Craftsman
Dates: 1905 to 1930 Followers of the Arts and Crafts movement (started in England in the late 19th century), A more vernacular version of the style, also known as Bungalow or Craftsman Bungalow, was popularized through the patterns of Gustav Stickley's Craftsman magazine. The style also grew out of Frank Lloyd Wright's work in the Prairie style at the turn of the 20th century.

Modernistic
Dates: 1920 to 1940 Earlier Modernistic houses of the 1920s were in the Art Deco style, while later examples were in the more streamlined Art Moderne style. Both were adaptations of the popular forms used on commercial buildings of the time (like New York City's Chrysler Building).

International
Dates: 1925 to present The style took its name from a 1932 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art that showed the groundbreaking work of European Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before World War II, it was most popular in California (where this house by Richard Neutra is located) and affluent Northeast suburbs (such as New Canaan, Connecticut, where Philip Johnson's Glass House is).

Ranch
Dates: 1930s to 1960s Loosely based on Spanish colonial houses in the Southwest, the Ranch house is a creation of car culture: When homeowners began using their cars for transportation, they could put their houses farther apart on larger plots of land. Along with the splitlevel of the 1950s and 60s and the builder's shed of 1970s and 1980s, the Ranch was one of the dominant house forms of the second half of the 20th century.

Copied in part from This Old House

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