Queen Anne style

An American Queen Anne style home in Lebanon, Illinois.

The Queen Anne Style of British and American architecture reached its greatest popularity in the last quarter of the 19th century, manifesting itself in a number of different ways, not identically in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States of America.

The evocative and picturesque "Queen Anne" architecture in the 1870s onwards should not be confused with the English architecture actually produced during the historical reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), a manner that had been first established by John Webb and Sir Christopher Wren, and which evolved into a conventional mason-builder's vernacular classicism.^[1]

In the late 1850s, the name "Queen Anne" was in the air, following publication in 1852 of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne.

One minor side effect of Thackeray's novel and Norman Shaw's freehand picturesque vernacular Renaissance survives to this day. When, in the early 1870s, Chinese-inspired Early Georgian furniture on cabriole legs, featuring smooth expanses of walnut, and chairs with flowing lines and slat backs began to be looked for in out-of-the-way curio shops (Macquoid 1904), the style was misattributed to the reign of Queen Anne, and the "Queen Anne" misnomer has stuck to this day, in American as well as English furniture style designations. (Even the most stylish and up-to-date furnishings of the historical reign of Queen Anne, as inventories reveal, was in a style that would be immediately identified now as "William and Mary".)

19th century Queen Anne

The City of Wakefield MDC's Queen Anne style administrative HQ, County Hall, James Gibson and Samuel Russell, architects (1894-98)

The Queen Anne Style of British architecture in the 1870s (the industrial age) was popularized by George Devey and the better-known Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912). Norman Shaw published a book of architectural sketches as early as 1858, and his evocative pen-and-ink drawings began to appear in trade journals and artistic magazines in the 1870s. American commercial builders were quick to pick up the style.

The British Victorian version of the style is closer in empathy to the arts and crafts movement than its American counterpart. Its historic precedents were broad: it combined fine brickwork, often in a warmer, softer finish than the Victorians were characteristically using, varied with terra-cotta panels, or tile-hung upper stories, with crisply painted white woodwork, or blond limestone detailing: oriel windows, often stacked one above another, corner towers, asymmetrical fronts and picturesque massing, Flemish mannerist sunken panels of strapwork, deeply shadowed entrances, broad porches, in a domesticated free Renaissance style.

When an open architectural competition was announced in 1892, for a County Hall (see photo, right) to be built in Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the instructions to competitors noted that "the style of architecture will be left to the competitors but the Queen Anne or Renaissance School of Architecture appears suited to an old town like Wakefield" (ref. Wakefield). The executed design, by James Gibson and Samuel Russell, architects of London, combines a corner turret, grandly domed and with gargoyles at the angles, freely combined with Flemish Renaissance stepped gables.

American Queen Anne style

Queen Anne Style buildings in America came into vogue in the 1880s, replacing the French-derived Second Empire as the "style of the moment." The popularity of high Queen Anne Style waned in the early 1900s, but some elements, such as the wraparound front porch, continued to be found on buildings into the 1920s.

In America, Queen Anne generally refers to an era of style, rather than a specific formulaic style in its own right. Unlike its British counterpart's use of "crisp white trim" (see the example from Lebanon, Illinois), Queen Anne in America eschewed white for bold color resulting in Polychrome paint schemes on exteriors, often referred to as painted ladies, a term that rose in popularity in the 1970s. E. Francis Baldwin's stations for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, built variously of brick and wood, are also familiar examples of the style.

Famous American Queen Anne, the Carson Mansion in Eureka, California.

The most famous American Queen Anne residence (see photo left) and quite possibly the best and highest residential execution of the style in the western world, is the William M. Carson Mansion of Eureka, California. Newsom and Newsom, notable builder-architects of 19th Century California homes and public buildings, designed and constructed (1884-1886) this magnificent 18 room home for one of California's first lumber barons. The extensive detail resulted from the unique opportunity afforded to the Newsoms by Carson. He provided them with unlimited building material (located in his vast, adjacent lumber yards) and a virtually unlimited budget, in money, manpower, and use of his lumber schooners to retrieve exotic materials for the interior. This was due to the Carson's desire to keep as many as 100 craftsmen and workers busy during an economic downturn in the lumber industry. Originally the exterior colors reflected those seen in a Redwood forest. However, when ownership passed from descendants of the Carson family (for $35,000) to that of wealthy locals who formed a club in the residence in the 1950's, the new owners exchanged the reddish brown colors of the exotic Redwoods for the shades of green found on US currency!^[2]All styles described below as well as others are present in this exquisite example of American Queen Anne Style.

Within the American Queen Anne Style, broadly speaking, there were also the Stick, Eastlake, and Shingle Styles:

Stick Style

Herman C. Timm House, a stick style house in New Holstein, Wisconsin.

The Stick style sought to bring a translation of the balloon framing used in houses in the era by alluding to them through plain trim boards, soffits, aprons and other decorative features, while eliminating overtly ornate features such as rounded towers and gingerbread trim. Maximum picturesque value could be achieved within the means of a house-carpenter equipped with a woodturning lathe. Recognizably "Queen Anne" details: interpenetrating roof planes with bold panelled brick chimneys, the embedded corner tower (rendered as an octagon) with its conical roof, the wrap-around porch, spindle detailing, the "panelled" sectioning of blank wall, crown detailing along the roof peaks, radiating spindle details at the gable peaks.

The home of President Warren G. Harding (not illustrated) in Marion, Ohio is another example of stick style architecture; however the porch (which is best known as the home of the Front Porch Campaign of 1920) designed by architect Frank Packard and built onto the house is neo-classical in style, while influenced by the Queen Anne era in that it wraps around the house. Highly stylized and decorative versions of the Stick style are often referred to as Eastlake.

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's 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. It's important to realize, however, that Eastlake always emphasized "simple, elegant motifs" rather than the florid decorative excesses of high Victorian style, and the majority of the items labeled "Eastlake" appalled him, as he frequently wrote during his lifetime. This is particularly evident in the United States, where basic Eastlake motifs were usually multiplied into a dizzying geometric mandala of Victorian intricacy.

Shingle Style

A carefully restored shingle Queen Anne house opposite Queen's Park in New Westminster, British Columbia

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.

The Shingle Style also conveyed a sense of the house as continuous volume. This effect—of the building as an envelope of space, rather than a great mass, was enhanced by the visual tautness of the flat shingled surfaces, the horizontal shape of many shingle style houses, and the emphasis on horizontal continuity, both in exterior details and in the flow of spaces within the houses.

McKim, Mead and White and Peabody and Stearns were two of the notable firms of the era that helped to popularize the Shingle Style, through their large scale commissions for "seaside cottages" of the rich and the well-to-do in such places as Newport, Rhode Island. However the most famous Shingle Style house built in American was "Kragsyde" (1882) the summer home commissioned by Bostonian G. Nixon Black, from Peabody and Stearns. Kragsyde was built atop the rocky coastal shore near Manchester-By-the-Sea, Massachusetts, and embodied every possible tenet of the Shingle style.

Many of the concepts of the Shingle Style were adopted by Gustav Stickley, and adapted to the American version of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Additionally, there are several other notable styles of Victorian architecture, including Italianate, Second Empire, Folk and Gothic Revival.

References

1. ^ However confusion between buildings constructed during the reign of Queen Anne and "Queen Anne" Style persists, especially in England. The well known architectural commentator and author Marcus Binney writing in the London Times in 2006, describes "Poulton House" built in 1706, during the reign of Queen Anne as "....Queen Anne at its most delightful" The Times, "Bricks and Mortar" Supplement, pp6-7. 5 May 2006. Binney lists what he describes as the typical features of the style: a sweep of steps leading to a carved stone door-case; rows of painted sash windows in boxes set flush with the brickwork; stone [quoins]] emphasising corners; a central triangular pediment set against a hipped roof with dormers; typically box-like "double pile" plans, two rooms deep.
2. ^ Worthen, Evelyn Shuster. (1984).A Castle in Fairyland and other stories of the Carson Family and Their Mansions.

Further reading

• Girouard, Mark, Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860-1900, Yale University Press, 1984. The primary survey of the movement.
• Macquoid, Percy, Age of Walnut, 1904.
• Vincent J. Scully Jr, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of Wright, revised edition, Yale University Press, 1971.
• Rifkind, Carole. A Field Guide to American Architecture. Penguin Books, New York, 1980.
• Whiffen, Marcus. American Architecture Since 1780, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.

External links

• Wakefield: the origins of County Hall
• Queen Anne Style in Buffalo, New York, 1880-1910
• Photography of Queen Anne Style Homes in Hamilton, Ontario
• Hackley & Hume Historic Site, 1889, Muskegon, Michigan

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