With a new version of the style bible now in bookstores, it’s time to ask, what kind of house is this?
By Michael Good | HouseCalls
You’d think it would be a simple matter to identify your house’s style, but few preservation topics are as confusing, contentious and controversial.
Thirty years ago a Dallas socialite and former mayor’s daughter named Virginia Savage McAlester waded into the roiling waters with a book that sought to do the impossible: provide a classification scheme that could be applied to every house in America. If you can use a field guide to identify the birds of North American, why not the houses?
A Field Guide to American Houses proved a popular and critical success, and has become something of a bible for preservationists and old house enthusiasts. Now McAlester has revised her magnum opus (it weighs in at 820 pages, covering 50 styles and their variants.)
It’s an amazing achievement, particularly since the author was diagnosed with cancer during the editing of the book and didn’t know if she’d live to see it published. (Last week the New York Times reported that after a stem cell transplant she has fully recovered.)
While you’re waiting for your copy to get delivered, here’s a quick guide to San Diego’s early 20th century house styles.
Colonial Revival
The first Colonials were exceedingly plain, with small windows, simple doors and uncomplicated rooflines. They were followed by houses in the Georgian (1700-1780) and Federal (1780-1820) styles. Both were basically English styles based on Italian Renaissance designs, which were themselves revivals of Roman and Greek architecture. Some details to look for:
Entrance: Resembles the front of a Greek temple. Sometimes there is a triangular shape over the door, sometimes the underside of that shape is curved, sometimes the porch overhang projects several feet over the stoop and is held up by classical columns, sometimes the columns are doubled up and thin.
Windows: Usually double hung, with multiple panes, in adjacent pairs.
Siding: McAlester says stucco or brick. In San Diego in the ‘20s, it was wood.
Roof: Usually side-gabled. Sometimes hip-roofed. Sometimes gambrel roofed, making it Dutch Colonial.
Other details to look for: Symmetry, classical design details such as dentil molding and Greek pillars.
Mission
In California there wasn’t an official mission style — each friar was left to design his own. Soldiers actually built the Missions, and most of them came from Andalusia; so in California, the Missions and outlying buildings looked a lot like Andalusian farmhouses of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Exterior: Stucco, sometimes distressed to look like crumbling plaster over adobe or brick.
Roof: Flat or hipped, side, front or cross-gabled, covered in red tile, but always with a Mission style parapet.
Other distinguishing characteristics: In San Diego, buttresses and garden walls that tie in to to the main structure, as well as towers, sometimes purely decorative.
Spanish Colonial
McAlester, like many historians, traces the genesis of the style to the 1915 Panama California Expo in San Diego. But Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the principal architect, was inspired by his travels in Iran and the Mediterranean, as well as Spain. Furthermore, the architects and builders constructing the majority of the buildings in the Expo ignored Goodhue while he was away in New York. Historians are still trying to identify their influences. The famous Cabrillo Bridge, for example, was not built to Goodhue’s plan. It’s more Roman aqueduct than Spanish viaduct. Hallmarks of the style:
Roof: Low-pitched, red-tile roof, usually with little or no eave overhang.
Exterior: Sanded plaster, often with troweled or brushed effects to simulate age and the craftsman’s hand.
Façade: Usually asymmetrical.
Doors: Often surrounded by pilasters, spiral columns, imitation stonework and tile. Front doors often appear to be carved (they’re actually milled in a factory).
Windows: Can be double hung, but often casement, with arches and divided lights.
Other details: There is a world of possibilities, because, as McAlester puts it, the details in Spanish Revival houses have been “borrowed from the entire history of Spanish architecture.” That includes Moorish, Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance.
Craftsman
McAlester classifies this style as “modern,” which is appropriate, since its practitioners were seeking to create something totally new. She credits the style to the Greene Brothers, but she might have given Gustav Stickley some credit too. He promoted the style in The Craftsman magazine. Today, the features are so familiar they hardly need describing:
Roof: Low-pitched gabled roof, with wide unenclosed eave overhangs. Exposed roof rafters. Beams and brackets and braces added under the eaves.
Porch: Usually full or partial width, with roof supported by tapered columns carried to ground level. Porch roof supports are often a distinctive detail, with short, slight columns resting on massive piers, made of stone, brick or stucco.
Layout: An informal design, with front door opening directly into living room.
Other features: Copious millwork.
Prairie
Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, there were dozens of inventive architects in the Midwest designing uniquely American houses that emphasized the wide-open horizon of the Prairie. Their influence spread to San Diego, where builders created their own version. Nathan Rigdon, Morris Irvin and Marvin Melhorn were among the San Diegans experimenting with the style in Mission Hills. In Loma Portal, Prairie-style houses more closely resemble those of Wright and his contemporaries. In Hillcrest, Irving Gill built his own version on 7th Ave., across from the Marston House.
Entrance: In California, often under a broad porch. The porch wall is usually topped with a wide plaster cap, often in a contrasting color. The front door often with three vertical lights above a horizontal drip cap.
Windows: Art glass in the Midwest in geometric patterns and stylized flowers. Upper sashes, often with divided lights in a variety of patterns. Designs were usually repeated in bookcases and China cabinets. Single light lower sash.
Roof: Low-pitched, often hipped with widely overhanging eaves that unlike Craftsman houses, were boxed.
Other details: In the west, large classical porch pillars, repeated inside in the millwork.
Tudor Revival
As McAlester points out, the name is inaccurate—the houses we call Tudor don’t really resemble what was being built in England during the time of the Tudors (16th century). When they were built in San Diego in the 1920s, the houses were generally referred to as English and were as much inspired by Hollywood as Britain.
Entrance: Usually under a steeply raked gable, sometimes surrounded by (usually faux) stone. Doors are sometimes multi-paneled, sometimes built of planks, sometimes with metal bands that imitate hinges. The intended effect is rustic.
Roof: Steep, with cross gables. The roof itself is usually made of wooden shingles, sometimes laid in waving patterns, sometimes bent to resemble thatch, wrapping around the eaves.
Windows: Leaded glass with diamond panes for the formal rooms.
Façade: Stucco, brick or stone. Later, in the thirties, wood siding began to be used, and the half-timbering disappeared, as part of the austerity measures that the FHA imposed on builders. This, McAlister claims, led to a whole new style of house, a sort of impoverished traditional that eliminated all pretenses to style and brought the party to an end, until the rise of the Ranch in the 1940s.
