Home Trends

While many architectural styles in the United States took their inspiration from abroad, a few are largely home grown. The Pueblo Revival style, also known as the Santa Fe or Adobe style, is one of these. With roots in the traditional building methods of the Southwest’s native Pueblo people, this style is best known for its simple, geometric massing and adobe or stucco exteriors in shades that reflect the colors of the surrounding desert.

Ancient Techniques Get a Modern Update

For thousands of years, the indigenous people of the arid Southwestern United States built their homes using natural materials and techniques that kept the interiors cool all day and warm at night. The Taos-speaking Pueblo people are particularly well known for this style. When Spanish missionaries and territorial authorities arrived in New Mexico in the 17th century, they adopted the style for their own buildings. Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors is an early example.

After this period, interest in Pueblo architecture lay mostly dormant among non-indigenous people until the late 19th century, when architects in California, such as A. C. Schweinfurth, began experimenting with the style.

From here, interest quickly spread to New Mexico and the Pueblo Revival style was born. The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, founded in 1889, was one of the first buildings to incorporate Pueblo-style features in a major way. Its oldest buildings are still considered archetypes of the Pueblo Revival style, although later buildings take a more creative approach to the style.

After 1912, Pueblo Revival had thoroughly caught on in New Mexico and began spreading to ancestral Pueblo areas in Arizona and Colorado as well as to other western states without historical Pueblo populations.

Santa Fe, New Mexico became a hotspot for the Pueblo Revival style starting in the 1920s thanks to the efforts of city planners and architects, such as John Gaw Meem, who aimed to give the city a distinctive look rooted in its regional history. In particular, they wanted an aesthetic that would set them apart from the rapidly spreading Mission Style architecture of southern California. This desire for a new identity was helped along by the fact that New Mexico had gained statehood status in 1912.

The Pueblo Revival style became so strongly associated with Santa Fe that a law was passed to protect the city’s one-of-a-kind look. In 1957, the Santa Fe “H” Historical District Regulations Ordinance, better known as the Historical Zoning Ordinance, established a historical district in central Santa Fe. The ordinance is still in effect. Within the historical district, all new buildings must be built in an “Old Santa Fe Style,” which includes Pueblo-inspired styles.

Although Pueblo Revival hit the peak of its popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, it’s still commonly used throughout the Southwest. Today’s Pueblo Revival buildings often take a loose interpretation of Pueblo architecture and include elements from other architectural movements, but the Pueblo influence is still easy to see.

Simple Forms and a Connection to Nature

Pueblo Revival buildings feature a unique set of characteristics that make them immediately recognizable. Like traditional Pueblo buildings, they’re based on rectangular forms. Although the Pueblo people often built massive communal living spaces reaching up to five or six stories, most Pueblo Revival buildings are limited to one or two stories. When they are larger, they use the same stepped massing style of the originals, with stepped levels becoming progressively narrower toward the top.

The Pueblo people built their homes using adobe, a mixture of soil, organic material such as straw, and water. Their traditional method, known as puddled adobe, is a technique in which clumps of adobe are built up by hand. This creates thick walls that keep out heat during the day and insulate at night.

Spanish settlers helped speed up this process by supplying wooden brick molds. The word adobe, in fact, is Spanish for mudbrick. Nonetheless, the structures retained their traditional gently rounded corners rather than the 90- degree corners of typical brick buildings.

More recent Pueblo Revival buildings are usually made from commercially available material, but the rounded corners remain. These buildings might be clad in adobe plaster for a truly traditional look or, for something more modern, finished in stucco or concrete which is then painted in earth tones.

Like their predecessors, Pueblo Revival buildings feature large wood doors and small, unadorned rectangular windows set deeply into the walls. Rounded corners on the doors and windows reflect the corners of the exterior walls.

Roofs are typically flat with no overhangs and trimmed with parapets, or low walls along the roof edges, in varying heights. Rainwater drains through “canales,” or extended roof scuppers. On less traditional Pueblo Revival buildings, low-pitched tiled roofs are sometimes used.

Pueblo Revival buildings often feature “vigas,” or thick, exposed wood roof beams that extend past the roofline. In traditional Pueblo buildings, these beams support “latillas,” or laths, and the two together support the adobe roof. In Pueblo Revival buildings, the vigas are often only decorative. Vigas might be further decorated and supported by corbels underneath. First used on medieval cathedrals, corbels are a Spanish missionary addition to Pueblo-style architecture. Unlike elaborate medieval corbels, however, Mission Style corbels take simple, squarish forms.

Porches and patios, either open, covered or fully enclosed are a common component of Pueblo Revival buildings. They’re often supported by Spanish-style wood posts made from the same wood as the roof’s vigas.

Not all post-19th century buildings with Pueblo-style elements are true Pueblo Revival. The Pueblo Revival movement also gave rise to Pueblo Deco, which combines Pueblo features with the eclectic ornamentation of Art Deco.

Unique to the desert Southwest, the Pueblo Revival architectural style creates a sense of continuity between ancient and modern architecture and offers a connection to the local natural environment. Taking a closer look at the features of this style will give you a better understanding of how the region’s culture has developed over time.

Staying comfortable in Florida’s heat and humidity isn’t easy under the best of circumstances, and for the state’s early settlers, circumstances were hardly ideal. With little in the way of time or resources, they relied on local materials and ingenuity when building their homes. The Florida Cracker architectural style was the result. As simple as these homes look, they’re equipped with numerous features that helped settlers withstand the local climate.

New Arrivals Rise to the Challenge of Florida’s Climate

Florida Cracker architecture is a vernacular, or local traditional, style that thrived in rural Florida from the 1860s to the 1930s. To shelter themselves from Florida’s often inclement weather, early settlers used their limited means to build simple, log or wood-framed structures. These modest homes would eventually become one of the state’s most distinctive architectural forms.

In Florida and Georgia, the term “Cracker” refers to the descendants of early English settlers. Possibly deriving from a Shakespearean-era insult for rowdy troublemakers, the term’s origin has been variously ascribed to the sound of loud talk or of cracking corn or whips. Today, rural white people of Florida and Georgia still proudly or jokingly describe themselves as Crackers.

While Florida might be famed for its mild weather now, the state’s dense swampland, oppressive tropical heat, and frequent thunderstorms with heavy rains proved challenging for the first English settlers. They needed shelter quickly, but had little experience building in such a climate and were often too poor to buy materials or hire help. Settlers were forced to use the materials on hand and building methods that would get a roof over their heads as quickly as possible.

When a settler family wanted to build a house, they first sought out a parcel of land that was at least slightly elevated to reduce the risk of flooding. They then cleared the land of the tall slash pines and pond pines as well as cedar and cypress common in the region. This abundant freshly cut wood provided the settlers’ building material.

Most built a primitive, one-room house consisting of four walls, a door and several windows, a fireplace and chimney, and a covered porch. As the need and means for more space arose, some families built an additional structure beside the first and connected the two with a covered open-air passage.

As construction technology and residents’ experience developed, the Florida Cracker architectural style fell out of favor. The rising cost of wood also made the style less appealing to those looking for a budget-friendly home. The growing popularity of air conditioning after World War II meant these houses’ cooling features were no longer essential. Crudely built to begin with, most of the original Cracker homes quickly broke down and the style all but disappeared, giving way to mobile homes and tract houses. The ones that do remain are found primarily in North Florida.

The Cracker style’s first reappearance in decades came in the early 1980s as Floridians turned against cookie-cutter building methods and appealed for homes with more personality and a deeper connection to local traditions. Today, several whole communities have developed offering Florida Cracker style houses with modern amenities. While some of the older generations are perplexed that anyone would choose a building style long associated with poverty, “Cracker Chic” has caught on with the younger crowd.

Ingenious Features for Comfort on a Budget

The original Florida Cracker homes might have looked like little more than shacks, but they were carefully designed to keep their inhabitants comfortable affordably.

The houses were square or rectangular for quick, easy construction. Early versions were built from logs, which reduced the need to cut boards. Gaps between the logs also allowed for better airflow indoors. Timber-frame versions were also built, although somewhat later. In some homes, a fireplace with a stone chimney on one gable end of the house provided the means for cooking and winter heating. Others used a detached kitchen behind the house.

Most Cracker homes consisted of a single room in a form known in American pioneer architecture as a single-pen house. To expand their living space as more children arrived, families often built another structure several feet from the gable end of the first and extended the roof to create a “dog trot” or breezeway between the two. This turned their single-pen house into double-pen one.

Using coquina rocks, oyster shell or clay bricks or occasionally log pilings, builders created raised floors that promoted cooling airflow and reduced the risk of floodwaters reaching the interior. The space this left under the house also provided shelter for hunting dogs and chickens.

Builders included plenty of windows, usually on opposite sides of the house to allow for cross breezes. Some added a high clerestory window or small cupola to vent built-up heat. The houses were then topped with high, steep roofs that shed rain easily and allowed heat to rise above the main living space. Pine or cypress shingles were the most common roofing material, but those who could afford it covered their roof in tin for even greater protection from the rain. Tin would also reflect the sun’s heat away.

No Cracker-style home would be complete without its covered porch. In humid Florida, even a well ventilated home can get stiflingly hot, so outdoor living spaces were essential. Porches and verandas were built deep and wide to create deep shade under the porch roof. These often wrapped all the way around the house to shade the interior and deflect the rain. Keeping rain out was particularly important because window glass was hard to come by and Florida settlers often had only mosquito netting or shutters to cover their windows.

While many Cracker-style homes were left unclad, others were finished in cedar clapboard or board-and-batten siding. The originals were rarely painted, but for modern versions, white is the color of choice, largely for its ability to deflect heat. Other light tints such as pale yellow or blue are also used.

With today’s air conditioning and mechanical ventilation, building an exact replica of a Cracker home might not be practical, but many of the style’s features are still useful. Covered porches, steep roofs, and clerestory windows all cut down on the need to run the A/C.

Architects have been known to include these energy-efficient features not only in modern Cracker-style homes, but also in Florida beach cottages and bungalows. Whether you’re dreaming of building a home in classic Florida Cracker architectural style or you’re just looking to spot Cracker houses around Florida, knowing how the style’s features came to be will give you a good start.

With its asymmetrical roof and restrained facade, the Saltbox house has become an icon of New England’s coastal areas. When Colonial-era families first developed the style, though, they weren’t aiming for aesthetic appeal. The Saltbox architectural style was born as an adaptation to the harsh realities of early Colonial life. Families learned to be inventive with their simple means, and it’s the creative simplicity of these houses that still earns them admiration today.

A Practical Solution for Growing Families

The Saltbox architectural style first appeared in New England and Atlantic Canada around 1650, in the earliest years of the Colonial Period. Faced with a harsh climate and limited resources, settlers opted for modest, sensible homes. First came the symmetrical two-story houses in what would later become known as the Cape Cod style. The Saltbox is an adaptation of this style.  

With 10 to 15 people sharing a single house and limited means to build anything new, settlers needed low-cost ways to add more living space to their existing homes. One way they accomplished this was by building a single-story lean-to onto the back of their house. This expanded the floor space, but saved on material. Instead of building a whole new roof, the homeowners extended the existing roof down over the new lean-to addition.

It’s this adaptation that gives Saltbox homes their distinctive lopsided shape. The style takes its name from the slanted lids of the saltboxes colonists hung on their walls. At the time, salt was hard to come by and valuable enough to merit display in decorative wooden boxes.

Some homeowners used all the space in their new addition for storage. Because many Saltbox homes started as just one room deep, though, families often maximized the additional space by dividing it into three rooms. The center was typically turned into extra cooking space or a “keeping room,” a stove-heated space beside the kitchen where families slept in winter. The spaces on either side were often turned into a pantry and a “borning room” used for childbirth and illness.

What started out of sheer practicality soon caught on, and by 1680 the Saltbox was an architectural style in its own right. New Englanders began building their homes with the lean-to addition and slanted roof included right from the start. The charmingly whimsical shape was only part of the appeal, though.

The Saltbox’s rectangular foundation makes it easy to built and add onto later. The steep roof provides excellent drainage, letting the area’s heavy snowfall slide right off. The central fireplace and low ceilings keep the interior evenly cozy throughout the long, cold winters. The small leftover triangle of space under the addition’s roof acts as another barrier against the cold. On the exterior, the unpainted wood siding required only minimal upkeep, which cut down on the colonists’ already burdensome workloads.

One popular bit of folklore suggests the Saltbox architectural style really came into its own thanks to Queen Anne’s taxation of homes higher than one story. In reality, it’s unlikely this law had as much influence as the style’s other practical benefits.

New Englanders remained the biggest fans of Saltbox architecture, but the style managed to gain some interested in nearly every corner of the country. Architects even borrowed this modest home style for public and commercial buildings. The Saltbox’s popularity outside New England dropped off around 1800, but didn’t see much decline within New England until the late 1830s.

During the Colonial Revival period between 1900 and 1950, Saltbox and other Cape Cod-style houses saw another slight uptick. These days, they’re something of a novelty, but the style has endured thanks to its attractive minimalism and functionality.

Modest Features Under a Distinctive Roof

As rectangular buildings with high-pitched roofs and unadorned central entrances, Saltbox houses are in many ways similar to Cape Cod houses. What sets the Saltbox architectural style apart is the rear single-story addition and the asymmetrical roofline it creates. Look for this feature and you can tell a Saltbox at a glance.

From the top, the roof starts like any gable-style roof that slopes down from a central ridge. Instead of sloping down to the same length, though, one side slopes much farther to cover the addition and reaches below the height of the eaves on the other side. This longer slope is known as a “catslide.” On some homes, the lower edge of the catslide is less than six feet off the ground.

On traditional Saltbox homes where the rear one-story space was added after the main two-story house was built, you might spot a break in the roof angle and a line on the side of the house where the old back wall used to be.

A broken roofline isn’t always a tell-tale sign, though. Some builders intentionally designed the main two-story section with a low or steeply pitched roof, then changed the roofline over the rear one-story space to provide enough ceiling height. This creates a break even though both parts of the house were built at the same time.

Most original Saltbox homes were built using the timber framing construction method. This method uses traditional wood joinery, making it more economical than relying on metal nails, bolts, and other fasteners, which were costly at the time.

A large central chimney is a classic look for Saltbox homes, but you’ll also find a minority fit with a pair of smaller end chimneys. As with many Colonial-style homes, Saltboxes often feature double-hung windows with four- or six-light window sashes. A rectangular transom window over the entrance for ventilation and light is more particular to Saltbox houses specifically. Beyond this, the facade is adorned only with minimal, understated trim.

In modern and restored older Saltbox homes, the rear addition is usually no longer divided into three rooms. Instead, it’s incorporated into a contemporary open floor plan to create a sense of spaciousness and flow.

Narrow clapboard or shingle siding is the most common cladding for traditional Saltboxes. On the original homes, the siding was left to weather to a natural grayish brown. Today, most Saltbox exteriors are stained, while others are painted white or a subdued shade of brown, grey, red, or yellow.

The appeal of the Saltbox architectural style goes well beyond its looks. The design is a testament to the resourcefulness of Colonial-era families and a practical approach to staying comfortable in New England’s challenging climate.

With its complex structures and ornate embellishments, high-style British Victorian architecture conveys a distinct sense of luxury. To enjoy the beauty of this style for themselves, middle-class Americans of the era were inspired to find a more practical alternative. Enter the folk Victorian style. Built with a more inventive, eclectic approach, folk Victorian homes display many of the decorative elements associated with high-style Victorian homes, but with a few fundamental differences.

Affordable Embellishments for the Masses

Folk Victorian architecture thrived between 1880 and 1910, putting it slightly behind the Victorian architectural period in Britain. It emerged as a more practical and affordable alternative to the opulent Italianate and Queen Anne styles popular during the Victorian period.

Homes in this style are found throughout the United States. Once the look caught on in the east, it spread rapidly westward, thanks in large part to innovations in woodworking tools, mass production, and the railroad system. Pre-fabricated millwork such as posts, molding, and trim became widely available and could be transported efficiently by rail to lumberyards around the country, giving more people access to it. Homeowners were no longer limited to whatever local craftspeople produced with traditional tools.

The folk Victorian style became particularly popular among the newly settled population in the west. These homeowners were looking for flexible, budget-friendly ways to embellish their existing houses.

In fact, many homes classified as folk Victorian today started out as simple folk houses built in the style typical of their region. When the Victorian style took hold, owners of these houses updated them with the new Victorian-style trim that was on offer at nearly every lumber mill.

The same railroad system that carried millwork to homeowners also benefited from the trend, with new depots, stations, and related buildings popping up in folk Victorian style as the rail lines expanded.

By 1910, the popularity of the folk Victorian look faded as the Craftsman style began to take over.

Folk Victorian Features: Simplicity with Flair

In Britain, the grand Victorian homes in the prevailing Queen Anne, Italianate, and Gothic Revival styles were the domain of the wealthier classes. These houses are known by their asymmetric designs with complex, multi-room floor plan and their abundance of towers, bay windows, multiple gables, and second-story porches.

American folk Victorian, on the other hand, was something within reach of the average citizen. With folk houses as their basis, folk Victorians are typically smaller and simpler in design with plain rooflines. Their profiles are symmetrical with only one front-facing gable. Victorian-style embellishments were added to this basic form, and it’s these embellishments that
sets a house apart as a folk Victorian.

The embellishments used are most often inspired by the Queen Anne and Italianate styles, with occasional appearances by Gothic Revival details. The ground-floor front porch is quintessential to the design, and it’s often the most heavily decorated part of the house. This was the era when the classic American front porch really took root.

The most common porch posts are turned spindles (balusters) or posts with simple chamfered (beveled) edges as well as posts embellished with carvings and added details. These supports are enhanced with friezes above, balustrades between the posts, and intricately cut spandrels in the upper corners.

The cornice lines, overhanging eaves, and gable-ends are trimmed with bands of decorative millwork. Window and door moldings, when used at all, are usually limited to one simple header pediment. This streamlined approach to molding is another aspect that sets folk Victorian architecture apart from its British counterpart, which features elaborate molding.

The exterior of a folk Victorian home is usually clad in clapboard or board-and-batten style cladding, although scalloped shingles or shakes are also popular. In their prime, folk Victorian homes often boasted the exuberant polychrome color schemes typical of any Victorian-era home. Today, many have been re-painted in polychrome schemes using more subdued Victorian colors such as dark green, butter yellow, and gray. 

Homes as Varied as Their Owners

While all folk Victorian homes have certain aspects in common, such as their elaborate trim, they were also influenced by design trends that varied from region to region. Beyond these similarities, though, no two are exactly alike, and their individuality is part of their charm.

Some include floor plan differences such as second-story balconies or bay windows, but it’s the variety of details that really sets each house apart. Folk Victorians were built based on designs in the plan books or pattern books architectural companies and lumber mills at the time produced to help homeowners and builders gather ideas. Each book offered anywhere from a handful of plans to more than one hundred.

As thorough as they were, they didn’t always classify millwork in terms of styles, such as Queen Anne or Gothic Revival. This made it harder for those choosing parts to get a look consistent with a high-style Victorian appearance.

When builders and homeowners added millwork to existing folk houses, they had a wide range of trim, molding, and other detailing options to draw from. While some followed the plan books’ suggestions precisely, others mixed and matched from several books or worked from their own ideas. In the hands of highly skilled craftspeople, the results were often strikingly unique. Neighborly competition for the most elaborate house further drove creativity.

Mills also sold complete packages of porch parts, but the millwork included wasn’t always true to one particular style. Do-it-yourselfers and less skilled professional builders who relied on these packages often ended up with an eclectic Victorian look.

More than just decorative buildings, folk Victorian homes are symbols of adaptability and self-expression born of growing industrial development. Learning to recognize the creative combination of simple structures and ornate detailing in these homes will give you a little more insight into a flourishing period in America’s past.

The words “Antebellum home” evoke visions of the grand, opulent mansions that often served as plantation homes throughout the Deep South. They’re homes like Gone With the Wind’s palatial Tara with its stately columns and broad, covered veranda. While certain traits characterize the Antebellum architectural style, the term covers a wide variety of Southern homes built before the American Civil War. It’s this variety and historical significance that makes the style so interesting to study.

Symbols of a Burgeoning Economy

Antebellum homes are the mansions built, typically as part of a plantation, in the South during the Antebellum period between 1820 and 1860, before the Civil War broke out in 1861. Antebellum is a Latin term meaning “before war.” These homes can be found throughout the Southern states, but they’re most common in the Deep South states of Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

As such, the Antebellum architectural style isn’t a specific set of features, but rather a time and place often called the Old South. These impressive residences owe their existence to the wealth of the plantations that thrived at the time.

With Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, more Europeans set out to try their luck in America. Many of these immigrants bought land to produce in-demand crops such as cotton, tobacco, sugar, and indigo or became traders of these crops, kicking off the South’s great plantation era. They also brought in a slave labor force, which allowed the plantation owners to keep most of the profits for themselves.

Their wealth was further fueled by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution that peaked between 1820 and 1860, overlapping the Antebellum period. New farm machinery made agriculture more productive while the growing railway system made it more profitable to ship goods around the country. The result was an unprecedented boom in commerce.

Plantation owners poured much of their wealth into grand mansions. The styles the recently arrived English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants favored, however, were largely new to the area. Before their arrival, the region was populated by Spanish and French settlers, as well as by native people such as the Natchez and Creek, who each built in the styles of their own cultures.

The newcomers brought their interest in Classical Revival architecture, particularly Greek Revival, which became popular in Europe after new architectural finds in Greece in the early 19th century. Seen as a symbol of rationality and national pride, the style quickly gained traction in North America after 1820.

It’s easy to assume these ostentatious Southern mansions were built merely out of self-indulgence and the opportunity to flaunt newly acquired wealth. In reality, they were often intended as demonstrations of love and devotion. At the time, it was common for a wealthy man to have his bride’s dream house built as a wedding gift.

As beautiful as they might be, Antebellum plantation homes are tainted with the terrible history of the slave trade from which they grew. Some believe the buildings should be razed entirely on the basis that it’s unethical to continue enjoying the products of slavery. Others, however, would prefer to preserve them to educate future generations on a dark aspect of the nation’s past.

Historians estimate less than 20 percent of these once-prevalent mansions remain in usable condition. Many were burned during the Civil War, and others have since been destroyed by natural disasters such as hurricanes. Still, others have simply fallen into neglect. Some, however, live on and serve as hospitality or educational facilities.

Classical Grandeur With a Southern Flair

The Antebellum architectural style draws from a variety of building traditions, but the Neoclassical Revival movement was the prime source of inspiration for builders of these homes. Antebellum homes often exhibit features of the Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and Italianate styles as well as the French Colonial and Federal styles.

These styles share key features that came to characterize Antebellum architecture. The typical Antebellum home is grand in scale with an overall blocky form. The symmetrical facade features large, evenly spaced windows and stately Greek-style columns or pillars. Porticos with triangular front pediments shelter both the front and rear entrances. Spacious balconies and covered porches encircle nearly the entire exterior. The roof is typically hipped or gabled and crowned with roomy central Italianate cupola, or onion dome, that formerly offered a view of the plantation grounds.

It’s no coincidence architectural elements from the Mediterranean became popular in the American South. Features common to the Antebellum architectural style were chosen to keep the inhabitants comfortable throughout the long, hot Southern summers.

Deep roof overhangs shield the home’s interior from the region’s intense sunlight. The numerous wide windows can be opened on all sides of the house to make the most of cooling breezes. The covered balconies, verandas, and porches offer an essential escape from the heat. Even with the windows open, the interiors became unbearably hot for much of the year. Sheltered outdoor areas provide plenty of shaded, airy spaces for family and friends to gather in relative comfort. Porches often consisted of multiple levels to neatly partition the space for different purposes.

Other features are mostly for show. The massive Corinthian, Ionic or Doric columns are designed to grab attention and lead the eye upward, creating the impression of expansiveness and opulence. By recalling the dignity of the ancient Greek temples, they lend the mansions a sense of import.  

Intricate embellishments signal fine craftsmanship. These might include the cornices and friezes of the Greek Revival style, the carved bargeboards of the Gothic Revival style or the balustrades of the Italianate style.

Although the original Antebellum architectural style’s time has passed, if you’re a fan, you can still adapt the style to a modern home. Large windows, a central portico supported by columns, and a carved balustrade can give a contemporary home an Antebellum touch. Limiting embellishments, such as by choosing straight, square columns over ornate Corinthian columns, can further update the Antebellum look. Even if the style isn’t for you, there’s a lot to be learned from understanding how these luxurious residences came to be.

When the Gothic Revival movement emerged in Europe, the buildings constructed displayed the same carved stone features as their Gothic predecessors. While many of these design features soon carried across the Atlantic, they were more likely to be hewn from wood. The result is a style known as Carpenter Gothic, also called Rural Gothic and American Gothic. Arriving in the mid-19th century and still loved today, the Carpenter Gothic style has become one of the most captivating aspects of the American architectural landscape.

European Design Meets American Carpentry

Europe’s high Gothic period ran from the mid-12th century through the 16th century, but in the late 18th century, the style gained renewed interest, sparking the Gothic Revival movement. Once again, buildings with steeply pitched roofs, arched windows, and flying buttresses were popping up all over the continent.

By 1840, the style had finally reached the Americas, but with one major difference: the use of wood rather than stone. The stone used to construct Gothic Revival buildings in Europe wasn’t as readily available in North America and working it required more heavy, painstaking labor than builders at the time found practical.

Wood, however, was in abundant supply. Better yet, new woodworking tools, in particular the steam-powered scrollsaw, let carpenters recreate elaborate Gothic decorative features in wood at a fraction of the cost and time it took using traditional wood carving tools. Lumber mills could now mass produce decorative wooden parts and ship them around the country, making them widely and cheaply available.

The style spread around the country and soon became the first choice for new churches and cathedrals. American architects didn’t merely copy their European colleagues. Whereas European Gothic Revival buildings often displayed ostentatious facades lavished with decoration, Carpenter Gothic took a more subdued approach. Many Carpenter Gothic structures feature the typical Gothic vertical lines and decorative elements, but they’re overall less elaborate than their European counterparts.

Examples of Carpenter Gothic buildings are found in nearly every state, although they’re concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, and rarer in the Southwest. The style reached its peak between the 1840s and the 1860s, and gave rise to the Stick Style architecture of the late 19th century. In the 1940s, it saw a second resurgence and hasn’t gone fully out of style since then. Even today, plans for modern Carpenter Gothic homes are easily available.

Lofty Heights and Intricate Embellishments

Although built almost entirely from wood, Carpenter Gothic structures can still be recognized by the same features as high Gothic buildings. Most structures built in this style are churches or houses, with the houses being reminiscent of churches or castles. They’re typically two-story buildings designed with an emphasis on height and vertical lines.

Like high Gothic buildings, Carpenter Gothic buildings are highly asymmetrical with varying, steeply pitched roof angles and gables. Cross-gabled roofs, in which the roof ridges form a cross, are common. Towers, parapets, pinnacles, and spires add variety and verticality to the roof lines.

Windows and doors are typically tall with pointed arches, taking inspiration from the windows of English Gothic cathedrals. Oriel windows occasionally appear on Carpenter Gothic buildings, although less often than on European Gothic Revival structures.  

A spacious front porch is another important part of the Carpenter Gothic home. Porches feature square posts or spindle railings decorated with elaborate scrollwork. Unlike in later architectural styles, such as Queen Anne, Carpenter Gothic porches are usually limited to the front, ground-level of the house.

What really gives Carpenter Gothic buildings their character, though, are the numerous intricate ornamentations that grace the facades. Although carved from wood, they take their design cues straight from the high Gothic style. The arched windows are embellished with delicately cut traceries featuring trefoils and quatrefoils. The ends of the gables feature prominent bargeboards or vergeboards with elaborate open scrollwork. The roof’s fascia boards carry similar scrollwork. Collectively, these lacy carvings are often called gingerbread trim.

The diverse Carpenter Gothic style let carpenters take full advantage of their new saws to express their individual creativity, so builders’ options for ornamentation were nearly unlimited. Both decorative structures, such as towers, and trim were frequently included on the designer’s whim with no obvious cohesive theme or relationship to the main structure. In Arizona and New Mexico, brick Gothic Revival building were more common than Carpenter Gothic ones, but even these buildings received their share of decorative wood trim.

Builders didn’t always have free reign, though. The Ecclesiological Society in England put forth guidelines for Gothic Revival churches which were taken up by some American architects, such as Alexander Jackson Davis. These guidelines were established partly because many Gothic architectural features hold meaning in Christian symbolism. The trefoil, for example, signifies the holy Trinity.

Vertical board and batten siding is the favored cladding for Carpenter Gothic buildings, particularly the taller structures. This cladding isn’t from the Gothic tradition, but rather from the cabin construction traditions of Norway, Sweden, and other parts of northwestern Europe. It worked well with Gothic-style buildings because in addition to protecting the structure from rot, it also leads the eye upward to make the building appear taller. As a bonus, it imparts a homey, rustic look that high Gothic buildings lack. For smaller buildings, clapboard siding is often used.

Despite their showy trim, Carpenter Gothic buildings were typically painted in muted, natural colors such as gray, brown, beige, dark amber, and green. Today, owners of these homes often favor light gray or yellow, although darker greens and reds are also popular.

American architects, carpenters, and builders might not have had the material or the need to recreate Europe’s grand cathedrals, but that didn’t stop them from using what they had to interpret the Gothic style for themselves. By translating high Gothic’s vertical elements and gingerbread detailing from stone into wood and by reigning in the style’s flamboyant tendencies, they developed one of America’s most iconic architectural styles.