Ordinary American Buildings: Eight Styles from the Log Pen to the Patio Home

A single pen is a log cabin built as one unit, a simple rectangle of four walls, and a double pen joins two such structures under one roof with a breezeway between them. The saddlebag house shares one central chimney between two rooms. The form appears across the United States and was applied mainly to log construction.

Brownstone names both a brown Triassic-Jurassic sandstone and the townhouses built or faced with it. The stone was easy to quarry and carve, which made it an economical choice for nineteenth century rowhouses, though its softness left facades open to weathering. The raised entrance stoop is the mark of the type, and New York City, especially Brooklyn and Manhattan, is where it is most closely identified.

A false front is a decorative facade that hides the real roofline behind a parapet, used on commercial buildings in the Old West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aim was to echo the rectangular street faces of established eastern cities and give a young town the look of permanence. The area around Bend, Oregon saw heavy construction of them between 1900 and 1910.

Painted ladies are Victorian and Edwardian houses repainted in three or more colors to bring out their detail. The colors are a modern invention, not a historical revival, and the term grew from a repainting movement in San Francisco in the 1960s. It was formally coined in 1978 in the book Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians, and the practice has since spread to Baltimore, New Orleans, Cape May and Wellington, New Zealand.

Minimal Traditional developed in the 1930s as a stripped down version of the eclectic revival styles of the 1920s, and it dominated American domestic building until the ranch house arrived in the early 1950s. Its houses are small, with hipped or gabled roofs, little eave overhang and an off center front door. The Federal Housing Administration used it as a prototype for a minimum house most wage earners could afford, hence the names FHA house and Victory cottage.

High ranch, also called split entry or bi-level ranch, places two floors on either side of a shared entry, with a half flight of stairs up to the living spaces and a half flight down to the family room, laundry and garage access. It can also be made from an existing single story ranch house by raising it on jacks and inserting a new floor beneath.

Populuxe, a blend of popular and luxury, describes the American consumer design of the 1950s and 1960s in which mass produced goods and buildings were styled to suggest affluence. It favored pastel plastics, chrome-like finishes and geometric forms in stucco, sheet metal and stainless steel, and it overlapped with mid-century modern, Streamline Moderne and Googie architecture.

A patio home, also called a cluster home, is a small suburban house set close to its neighbors or joined to them, with exterior upkeep handled through association fees. It became common in the second half of the twentieth century, and the term first appeared in print in the mid 1970s. It has no standard legal definition, so most tax jurisdictions do not treat it as a separate category.