Shingle Style

The Shingle Style is an American residential architectural style that flourished from roughly the 1880s to the early 1900s, most closely associated with the New England summer resort towns where it first developed, above all Newport, Rhode Island. Its defining feature is a continuous outer skin of wooden shingles that wraps over both the roof and the exterior walls in a single unbroken surface, deliberately blurring the usual visual break between roof and wall that earlier Victorian styles had emphasized with contrasting materials. Shingle Style houses favor complex, rambling, asymmetrical massing built around large wraparound porches and irregular rooflines, and the style is closely associated with the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White as well as with Henry Hobson Richardson, whose own Romanesque influenced domestic work helped shape its sculptural, unified forms. The style is generally read as a distinctly American development that drew loosely on early New England colonial building traditions while rejecting the ornate, historically specific detailing of contemporary Queen Anne and other high Victorian revival styles.