The American House: Thirteen Domestic Styles from the Garrison to the McMansion

The garrison house is a two story New England type whose second story overhangs the front, with carved drops beneath the overhang. It is named for the military sense of the word, because these strongly built houses sheltered several families during frontier attacks in places such as Maine and New Hampshire.

This stop widens the view to the whole colonial inheritance, from about 1600 into the nineteenth century. It shows how English building methods were adapted to American materials and climate, with wood framing in New England, Dutch influence in the Hudson River Valley and plainer houses in the southern colonies.

A single house turns its narrow gable end to the street, with a longer side running back along the lot. The entry says a good deal about local climate: later versions added porches called piazzas on the south or west side to catch the wind, and the popular story that the form dodged a street frontage tax has no supporting evidence.

Antebellum, meaning before the war, names the neoclassical building of the American South in the thirty years before 1861. It is best known for plantation houses with tall columned porticos in Georgian, Neoclassical and Greek Revival forms, suited to a hot subtropical climate.

Orson Squire Fowler promoted the eight sided plan in an influential 1848 book, arguing it gave more floor area for less exterior wall and so lowered building cost and heat loss. Several thousand octagon houses were built, mostly in the 1850s, which makes this a house type driven by one author.

Carpenter Gothic applied Gothic Revival details to wooden buildings put up by house carpenters, not masons, using pointed arches, steep gables, board and batten siding and jigsawn trim. Pattern books by Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing spread it, and its best known example is the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa.

Named for the British writer Charles Eastlake and his book on household taste, this reform movement favored geometric ornament, spindles and incised lines over heavier decoration. In architecture it is treated as part of the Queen Anne style, and it reached its height from the 1870s through the 1890s.

Folk Victorian houses, built from about 1870 to 1910, are relatively plain in construction but embellished with decorative trim. They differ from Queen Anne houses by being less elaborate and having more regular floor plans, so this is the Victorian look in its modest form.

The California bungalow is the American Craftsman style applied to small and medium sized houses, flourishing from about 1910 to 1939 and spreading to Australia and New Zealand. Typical features include a front porch, exposed rafter eaves and a plan that enters directly into a living room centered on a fireplace.

The airplane bungalow adds a single second floor room surrounded by windows, said to resemble an airplane cockpit and meant as a summer sleeping room with breezes from all sides. An early example is the Pleasance House in Echo Park, Los Angeles, from 1914.

This revival is identified by a gambrel roof with flaring eaves over the long sides of the house. The term Dutch Colonial appeared in American usage between about 1920 and 1925, and the style stayed popular in the Northeast through the 1930s while drawing only loosely on the original Dutch colonial houses.

Prefabricated homes are manufactured off site in sections. The entry separates modular, manufactured and mobile homes, and notes that United States federal HUD codes govern manufactured and mobile houses while modular houses follow the International Residential Code, so similar looking homes can be regulated differently.

McMansion is an informal and often critical term for a large suburban house marketed to upper middle class buyers. The name appears to date from the early 1980s, and architectural historian Virginia Savage McAlester preferred the more neutral Millennium Mansion, which closes the trail on a style that is named by its critics.