Elle Decor 24 Best Modern Houses Around the United States

American house styles come up in many shapes, some with architectural details borrowed from classical profiles, some unique to the New World.

Distinguishing Features for 23 House Styles

The story of these styles' evolution parallels the timeline of American history—a colony dependent on the Mother State turns into an industrial nation with a unique design linguistic communication.

1. Log Cabin

Dates: up to 1850s.

Features: Log walls; ane- to three-room layout, sometimes with a eye passage (called a dogtrot).

The earliest settler houses went up speedily, using the most abundant fabric around—wood—to protect confronting the harsh atmospheric condition. Log cabins were common in the centre Atlantic colonies, similar this Appalachian house.

two. Saltbox

Dates: 1607 to early on 1700s

Features: Steeply pitched (catslide) roof that reaches to first story in the dorsum; massive central chimney; small windows of diamond paned casements or double-hung sash with nine or 12 lights.

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 improve at sloughing off snow and rain. Few original saltboxes survive, and many are museums, like this house in East Hampton, New York.

three. Georgian

Dates: 1700 to 1780

Features: Symmetrical facade; double-hung windows with 9 or 12 lights in each sash; paneled door with pilasters, transom lights, and sometimes a pedimented crown; brick in the Due south, clapboards in the N; dentil molding at the cornice.

American Georgian architecture is based on earlier European styles (not the British Georgian style of the same period), which emphasized classical Greek and Roman shapes. Georgian houses could be found in every part of the colonies in the 18th century.

four. Federal

Red brick Federal style home with symmetrical design.

Dates: 1780 to 1820

Features: Symmetrical facade; half dozen-over-half-dozen double-hung windows with shutters; paneled door with elaborate surround (pediment, pilasters, sidelights, and fanlight); dentil molding or other decoration at cornice.

Based almost entirely on the English Adamesque mode, the American Federal (or Adam) manner took its cues from ancient Roman architecture. This was the starting time style of the newly formed United States, and it had a identify in virtually every part of the country—peculiarly in bustling urban areas like Salem, Massachusetts, where this former This Old House TV project is located.

5. Greek Revival

Dates: 1825 to 1860

Features: Pedimented gable ends, portico or total-width porch with classical columns, half-dozen-over-6 windows with pediments.

Americans, newly enamored with Greek democracy, congenital borough buildings that looked like Greek temples. The style for columns and pediments seeped into residential architecture equally far as the virtually rural farmland, popularized through pattern books by Asher Benjamin and Minard Lafever.

6. Gothic Revival

Dates: 1840 to 1880

Features: Steeply pitched roof with decorated bargeboard and cross gables, arched gothic windows and doors with arched panels, start-floor porch.

The Gothic Revival is some other trend that started in England and made its way to the U.Due south. The fashion mimics the shapes establish on Medieval churches and houses, and is almost always found in rural areas.

vii. Italianate

Dates: 1840 to 1885

Features: Hip roof with deep, bracketed eaves; arched 1-over-1 or two-over-2 windows with elaborate crowns; paired-door entryway with glass in the doors.

Again modeled later on a fashion started in England, the Italianate mode rejected the rigid rules of classical compages and instead looked to the more informal look of Italian rural houses. Ironically, the style became very pop as an urban townhouse.

eight. 2d Empire

Dates: 1855 to 1885

Features: Mansard roof (hipped with two pitches) with dormers set into it and patterned shingles, deep eaves with decorative brackets, 2-over-2 or 1-over-i windows with elaborate hoods or pediments.

The mode is closely related to Italianate, just is always characterized by its mansard roof, named for the 17th-century French architect, François Mansart. The way proper noun refers to France's second empire—the reign of Napoleon III from 1852-1870—during which the mansard roof was in faddy.

ix. Queen Anne

Dates: 1880 to 1910

Features: Asymmetrical house shape with intersecting roof lines, turrets and bay windows; offset flooring porch; patterned shingles and decorative trim.

The Queen Anne way—what most people would call "Victorian"—is the beginning product of the American Industrial Age. After the Civil State of war, munitions factories converted to brand metal firm parts and the machinery to cutting mass-produced woods trim. The railroads brought these products to all regions at an affordable price. And the advent of forced air heating removed the need for rooms structured effectually stoves and fireplaces, pregnant new shapes abounded. Advances in paint technology introduced vibrant new colors to this American house mode.

10. Shingle

Dates: 1880 to 1900

Features: Exterior walls and roofs of forest shingles; asymmetrical house shape, oft organic to the landscape around it; big porches; intersecting roofs of different shapes, including gambrel.

A style mostly popular forth the coast in the Northeast, Shingle houses were commonly large architects' masterpieces, free-form mansions congenital into the rocks and hills of the shore.

11. Richardsonian Romanesque

Dates: 1880 to 1900

Features: Masonry exterior (stone or brick), asymmetrical house shape with Roman or Syrian arches and towers, arched windows.

Closely related to the Queen Anne and Shingle styles, Romanesque houses are always rock or brick. Though borough buildings were built earlier in the Romanesque Revival style, the form didn't show up on residences until the popular architect Henry Hobson Richardson started his practice in New York and Boston in the 1870s.

12. Folk Victorian

Dates: ca. 1870 to 1910

Features: Simple house forms decorated with elaborate spindlework, jigsaw-cut bargeboards, and other decorative trim.

Equally the industrial age made machine-cut woods details affordable and available to the average American, homeowners added mass-produced decorative trim (called gingerbread) to their small, elementary folk cottages to clothes them up in the style of the mean solar day.

13. Colonial Revival

Dates: 1880 to 1955

Features: Large entryway and surround, columns or pilasters, symmetrical facade, half dozen-over-six windows (frequently paired), side gable or gambrel roof.

The American Centennial celebrations of 1876 brought virtually a nostalgia for the country's by, including its early house styles. But rather than re-create those houses directly, architects like McKim, Mead, and White mixed and matched details from several early styles, including Dutch Colonial, Georgian, and Federal. This is one of the country's most enduring styles, as millions of examples survive, and a renewal of involvement in it led to a Neo-Colonial Revival on the "McMansions" of the belatedly 20th and early on 21st centuries.

fourteen. Cape Cod

Dates: 1920s to 1940s

Features: I story cottage with loft attic space, symmetical window placement on either side of paneled front door, simple door surround, dormers.

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 uncomplicated houses of colonial New England, though early examples were almost ever shingled, while 20th century Capes tin exist clapboard, stucco, or brick. Many houses of the postal service Globe State of war Ii building blast were Capes, including many of the 17,400 cottages in Levittown, New York, the state's commencement housing development.

15. Neoclassical

Dates: 1895 to 1950

Features: Full-summit porch with massive columns, Corinthian or Composite capitals, and large pediment; symmetrical facade.

The World'due south Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 featured a classical theme, sparking a renewed involvement in Greek and Roman architecture. This American firm fashion is closely related to Colonial Revival, as both look back on a time in American compages when classical forms dominated. The style is closely related to Colonial Revival, every bit both look back on a time in American architecture when classical forms dominated.

16. Tudor Revival

Dates: 1890 to 1940

Features: Steep-pitch side gable roof with cross gable and half timbering; double-hung or narrow, multi-calorie-free casement windows, some with diamond panes; semi-hexagonal bay windows; walls of stucco or stone (later examples).

More Medieval than Tudor, the style's details loosely harken back to an early English language form. Though the manner began in the tardily 19th century, it was immensely popular in the growing suburbs of the 1920s. A version of Tudor came back into faddy in the late 20th century.

17. French Revival

Dates: 1915 to 1945

Features: Steeply-pitched hip roof (without forepart-facing gable); flared eaves; exterior brick, stucco, or rock.

American soldiers serving in French republic during World State of war I would take seen many houses with these characteristics in the French countryside. Similar the Tudor Revival, which it resembles, the style was most pop in the growing suburbs of the 1920s.

18. Spanish Colonial Revival

Dates: 1915 to 1940

Features: Low-pitched red-tile roof, arched windows and doors, shaped parapet, asymmetrical facade, stucco outside.

The Panama-California Exposition in San Diego in 1915 featured the California pavilion, a edifice with details borrowed from Spanish, Mission, and Italian compages. The style was to the Southwest and Florida what the Colonial Revival and Tudor were to the Northeast and Midwest: an incredibly popular style that filled out the suburbs in the years later World War I.

19. Pueblo Revival

Dates: 1910 to present

Features: Flat roof, adobe or world-colored stucco walls with rounded edges, projecting wood beams (vigas).

Pueblo Revival houses take their roots in adobe houses built by Native Americans and Spanish colonial settlers in the Southwest. The fashion prevails in that function of the country, particularly in Arizona and New Mexico where originals survive. This house in Tucson was the subject of a This One-time House TV renovation.

20. Craftsman

Dates: 1905 to 1930

Features: Depression-pitched gable roof with deep, bracketed overhangs and exposed rafters; porches supported past massive piers and unadorned foursquare posts; windows and doors with long vertical panes.

Followers of the Arts and Crafts movement (started in England in the tardily 19th century), especially California architects Greene and Greene, spurned machine-fabricated products and emphasized the beauty of hand-crafted natural materials (the grain of oak, for case) over Victorian-era excesses.

A more than 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 piece of work in the Prairie style at the plow of the 20th century.

21. Modern

Dates: 1920 to 1940

Features: Flat roof, smooth stucco exterior with curved walls, horizontal lines either every bit grooves or balustrades, zigzag or geometric Art Deco details, plate-glass or glass-block windows.

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

22. International

Dates: 1925 to nowadays

Features: Flat roofs, clean lines, no decoration, cantilevered rooms, asymmetrical facade.

The style took its name from a 1932 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Fine art that showed the groundbreaking piece of work of European Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before Earth War II, it was well-nigh popular in California (where this house by Richard Neutra is located) and affluent Northeast suburbs (such as New Canaan, Connecticut, where Philip Johnson'south Glass House is).

23. Ranch

Dates: 1930s to 1960s

Features: Sprawling single story, wide facade, front-facing garage, low-pitched roof, asymmetrical facade.

Loosely based on Castilian 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 country. Along with the split-level of the 1950s and 60s and the builder's shed of 1970s and 1980s, the Ranch was one of the dominant firm forms of the 2d half of the 20th century.

mcfarlandwassithe.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.thisoldhouse.com/21018307/american-house-styles