19th CENTURY ITALIAN STYLES
ROMANTIC DETAILS FOR VILLA, ROW HOUSE, OR IN A RURAL VERNACULAR.
The Italian styles are, despite the name, an American classic—the most popular building style for over a generation, throughout the country. Deep eaves and heavy brackets, hooded windows and round arches were rendered on houses simple or grand, built of wood or brick or brownstone. Houses fall into three basic categories: the Villas, Renaissance Revival, and Italianate. Villas were meant to evoke the farmhouses and manors of the Italian countryside. Most often used for public buildings and in urban settings, the more formal Renaissance Revival style is restrained and symmetrical. Italianate encompasses everything else.
these styles represented 19th-century America’s interpretation of the classical vocabulary, already filtered through England and, earlier, the Renaissance. Noted architects—John Notman, Henry Austin, McKim, Mead & White, Richard Morris Hunt, Samuel Sloan, Gervase Wheeler— designed in the style, but most Italianate houses were based, directly or indirectly, on pattern-book examples derived from designs by tastemaker A.J. Downing and architect A.J. Davis. It became a vernacular style, easily adapted to different materials and budgets. The Italian forms and the Gothic
Revival arrived at about the same time, two picturesque styles that ended Greek Revival’s long reign. In England, Gothic would become the predominant style of the Romantic or early Victorian period. In America, however, the Italianate had become far and away the most fashionable architectural style by the 1860s. Builders nationwide would use its vocabulary almost until the end of the century. Easily recognized by its details, the freewheeling Italianate style (1850–1900) is the most interpretive of the Italian styles that swept the country starting around 1840. Italianate encompasses
everything from the ambitiously eccentric to the simplest rural vernacular. Many 19th-century farmhouses, in fact, are Italianate: basically, a rectangular I house with a porch and some brackets in the cornice.
Italianate houses, of course, were meant to evoke the stone construction of Italy; thus buff and straw stone colors are a good choice for exterior color. Bisque-color limestone, grey-green, and stoney grey to blue colors are appropriate. If the body color is light, do the trim darker: olive, drab, mahogany red-brown. If the body is dark, trim may be done in limestone-yellow or limestonegrey. Sash should be painted in a dark color. The front door was often varnished, not painted. Accent colors or a reversal of body and trim are popular on projecting bays. Italianate style waned during the postwar economic troubles of the 1870s. By the time things picked up, such Late Victorian favorites as the Queen Anne and Stick styles and the early Colonial Revival were in vogue.