Reformed Victorian  / Queen Anne Style

Intro

Victorian Queen Anne 1874–1910

English-derived and very popular from 1880 through the 1890s, the quintessential Victorian house is a period favorite. Robust but lighthearted exteriors, with their asymmetrical facades, towers, verandahs, and fancy-butt shingles, hint at the sweetly eclectic rooms inside.

It’s the most beloved of Victorian styles. Despite roots in the English “Queen Anne Movement”--a return to early, vernacular architecture--it is here a peculiarly American style in its mass-produced ornamentation (including “gingerbread”) and lavish use of wood. The Northeast, already heavily populated in the 1880s, has comparatively fewer examples that you might expect. Go south and west, however, and the style becomes more popular and more fanciful. The West Coast and resurgent areas of the New South have the most dizzying examples.

The Queen Anne Movement began in England in mid century, easily traced to the famous architect Richard Normal Shaw, a Gothicist. He and other Aesthetic reformers looked back to the reign of “good Queen Anne,” 1702–1714, as a simpler time, when workmanship was emphasized over superficial detail. In its original philosophy, the Queen Anne movement paralleled that of William Morris and Arts and Crafts reformers. (Shaw didn’t revive the motifs of Queen Anne’s short reign, however; rather, his buildings looked back to the late Tudor–Gothic, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods.)

When it flourished in America, of course, the idea was transformed. Ye olde simple brick house of the 17th century became, in its 1880s revival, the most complex and surface-ornamented of Victorian house styles.

The first American Queen Anne house is probably the half-timbered Watts–Sherman House in Newport, R.I., built in 1874 by Boston architect H.H. Richardson. By 1880 the style appeared in pattern books—Americanized and adapted for city lot and simple cottage. The explosion of turned ornament led to the spindlework interpretation, called Eastlake after the English tastemaker and furniture designer (who, by the way, repudiated such gauche American use of his name).

By the 1890s, the all-American Free Classic adaptation was widespread. Now porches had classical columns instead of turned posts. The houses also had Palladian windows and pedimented entries—it was the beginning of the Colonial Revival.