Shingle Style

The Shingle Style in America was made popular by the rise of the New England school of architecture, which eschewed the highly ornamented patterns of the Eastlake style. In the Shingle Style, English influence was combined with the renewed interest in Colonial American architecture which followed the 1876 celebration of the Centennial.

Architects emulated colonial houses’ plain, shingled surfaces as well as their massing, whether in the simple gable of McKim Mead and White’s Low House or in the complex massing of Kragsyde, which looked almost as if a colonial house had been fancifully expanded over many years. This impression of the passage of time was enhanced by the use of shingles. Some architects, in order to attain a weathered look on a new building, even had the cedar shakes dipped in buttermilk, dried and then installed, to leave a grayish tinge to the façade.

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Queen Anne Style architecture

The Queen Anne Style is a furniture and decoration style that reached its greatest popularity in the last quarter of the 19th century, manifesting itself in a number of different ways in different countries. It consisted largely of influences that harked back to "Old English" or even Tudor styles and characteristics.

This Queen Anne style derived from the influence of Richard Norman Shaw, an influential British architect of the late Victorian era. Seen from the 1870s onwards, this style revived features of English architecture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including, initially, elements from the historical reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). However the historic reference in the name should not be taken literally as most buildings in the Queen Anne style (including most of those illustrated in this article) bear very little resemblance to English buildings of 1702-14.

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Eastlake Style

The Eastlake Style is named for Charles Eastlake (1836-1906), an Englishman whose Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (1868) was highly influential in American design, by translating John Ruskin and William Morris’ ideas into a decorative vocabulary for the carpenter and builder.

The Eastlake style’s importance is delineated by the use of geometric shapes made possible by modern machine techniques of the era. By making these intricate shapes with machines, it was possible to duplicate the exact complex patterns repeatedly, and in unusual places, such as the inside plates of a hinge.

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