Queen Anne Style Architecture

Queen Anne style architecture, in its familiar Victorian era sense, is a revival style that became one of the most popular architectural fashions in the United States roughly between 1880 and 1910, part of the broader Victorian family of styles. Despite its name, the American Queen Anne style bears almost no direct resemblance to the earlier English Queen Anne architecture of the reign of the actual Queen Anne, who ruled Britain from 1702 to 1714 and whose own era favored a restrained, symmetrical style with an Italianate or Palladian derived pediment on the main facade. The later revival style instead developed in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century before spreading to America, and its distinguishing features include an asymmetrical facade, a dominant, often steeply pitched front facing gable or tower, and an eclectic mixture of surface textures and decorative detail across a single building. The style rose to prominence in the United States alongside the closely related Arts and Crafts movement as the Victorian era entered its later decades.