THE SHINGLE STYLE, 1874–1914
THE HOUSES ARE A BRIDGE FROM VICTORIAN TO EARLY MODERN DESIGN.
The Shingle Style has variously been described as the first modern American house style,
Richardsonian Romanesque done in shingles instead of stone, the first wave of the Colonial Revival, and as a subset of the Queen Anne Revival. A self-consciously vernacular style rendered by leading architects, it’s hard to pin down. The genre was born in New England but was popular in the Mid-Atlantic and influential in Chicago and, later, on the West Coast. It is informal and highly imaginative—a “summer cottage” style—and yet the houses were built for wealthy clients.
The biggest clue to style is the continuous skin of wood shingles that undulates over walls, dormers, and roofs. Surfaces are textured but taut, with little ornament. Any decoration tends to be in panels. Architects, including John Calvin Stevens in Maine and Peabody & Stearns in Boston, often used local stone for the foundation and even for the first storey.
Some examples are in the old English style of Richard Norman Shaw’s vernacular Queen Anne Revival in England; the look is post-medieval. For their rambling houses, American architects interpreted New England Colonial forms, including additions that would have come to the old houses over the years. Despite their size and Victorian roots, Shingle Style houses are curiously lacking in ostentation.
Although these houses are woodframed and clad in wood shingles, some examples bear a resemblance to contemporaneous Richardsonian Romanesque houses, with Norman entry towers and archways. In New England, both H.H. Richardson and William Ralph Emerson were designing in what would become known as the Shingle Style by the 1870s.
Many examples are more obviously Colonial Revival, with classical porch columns and Palladian windows. In most Shingle houses, public rooms are anchored by a huge living hall with a fireplace and an adjacent grand staircase.
Originals are rare: Few were built and many of those, being summer homes, have since burned, or been demolished or radically altered. (Naumkeag in Massachusetts, designed by Stanford White in 1886, is the grandest survivor.) But the style’s influence is apparent in many late-19th-century suburbs, where builders inspired by the well-publicized originals put up more modest versions.