Types of Home Styles
Colonial American house styles from the 1600s until the American Revolution include a wide range of architectural types, including New England Colonial, German Colonial, Dutch Colonial, Spanish Colonial, French Colonial, and, of course, the ever-popular Colonial Cape Cod.
The style was partially inspired by artifacts discovered in 1922 in King Tut's tomb, and many art deco buildings include the repeating designs and vivid color common in Egyptian artwork. Though it draws heavily from antiquity, art deco was considered ultramodern at the height of its popularity, with some of the first deco designs coming from the edgy Bauhaus School in Germany.
Originally, the term "Craftsman" meant a home built from a plan in Stickley's magazine, but it has come to mean homes built in the Arts and Crafts style. The bungalow was closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement.
The first Cape Cod houses fall into four categories: the quarter, half, three-quarter, and full Cape. The comparatively rare quarter cape is a single bay, usually a wider "outside" bay that would become rooms.
Dutch Colonial is a style of domestic architecture, primarily characterized by gambrel roofs having curved eaves along the length of the house. Modern versions built in the early 20th century are more accurately referred to as "Dutch Colonial Revival", a subtype of the Colonial Revival style.
Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830.
The ancient Greek temple model, with its row of tall columns and pediments, includes two of the most obvious characteristics of this style of historic home design. Painted plaster exterior. Although the buildings and ruins in Greece were all made of stone, American homes of this style were not.
Blocks of well-maintained Italianate-style row houses can still be found throughout New York City, especially in the borough of Brooklyn. These handsome brownstones, with their low stoops and dramatic arched entryways, have long been home to some of the most literary members of society.
Mediterranean Revival is a design style introduced in the United States in the waning nineteenth century variously incorporating references from Spanish Renaissance, Spanish Colonial, Beaux-Arts, Italian Renaissance, Arabic Andalusian architecture, and Venetian Gothic architecture.
Midcentury Modern Design Styles If houses reflect the times they were designed, midcentury modern is the architecture of ideas, created by those who believed the forward-looking style could be a vehicle for social change to create a better society.
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century. In its purest form, it is a style principally derived from the architecture of classical antiquity, the Vitruvian principles, and the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.
This type of home, immensely popular in the Southwest, has deeper roots than almost any other type of American architecture. It developed in New Mexico and Arizona around the turn of the 20th century, borrowing from the simple, sleek multifamily structures erected by the Pueblo Indians starting in 750 A.D.
Low-slung ranch homes, modeled after the casual style of homes on true Western ranches, were first built in the 1930s and spent the next four decades popping up like mushrooms all over the countryside.
The Tudor architectural style is the final development of Medieval architecture in England, during the Tudor period (1485–1603) and even beyond, and also the tentative introduction of Renaissance architecture to England.
But the term "Victorian architecture" actually refers to styles that emerged in the period between 1830 and 1910, during the reign of Queen Victoria. The Victorian era spawned several well-known styles, including Gothic revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne, stick style, Romanesque style and shingle style.