What I know...
- It was built in 1911.
- It sits on a street with 7 other houses that all have the same shape and floorplan (but different construction). There are probably 100 of this house in my city... and I've seen them in other places, as well. We even looked at 2 other versions before buying this one. Some of those houses have Victorian accents, some have very simple accents, some even have Craftsman-esque accents. Some are brick, some are clapboard, some are asbestos (like mine).
- It was originally a square. A small square, with about 700 square feet, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room and kitchen.
- The house is laid out with a living room/kitchen open space on one side, and the two bedrooms and bathroom (in between the bedrooms) on the other.
Any ideas? I would love to have them!
10 comments:
One Floor variant of a Cubic? See page 11 http://www.kzoo.edu/educ/syllabi/House%20Designs.pdf (My first answer was: You know, it's that pre-WWII house style that isn't a bungalow or a cape cod. They're all over Arkansas, and I've seen them in Chicago, too.) I think you could dress it up to be Craftsman if you wanted to. My Field Guide to Architectural House Styles (or whatever it's called) is in storage, so that's the best I can do.
While, architectural classification can be somewhat subjective, the type of house you have is a Bungalow. There are several different styles of bungalows. If I had to pick a style, maybe a colonial style bungalow. However I'm betting that it has a lot of craftsman elements inside.
It looks more like a cottage than a bungalow.
Thanks all! Isn't it a mystery? I'm going to look more thoroughly at those couple house styles, to see if I can pin it down.
I kept thinking about it (and Googling). New descriptor: Pyramidal roof vernacular or folk, post railroad. If you Google: Pyramidal roof post railroad, you'll come across links to similar ones in historic districts in Benicia, California and Manhattan, Kansas on the front page, but the specific links are long and ugly so I won't paste them in.
Some houses don't neatly fall into a category. They are sometimes regional house styles that have neat features from a bunch of different styles. Those houses are often called my their most defining feature.
Your house - a square with 4 foors, a hipped roof and porch is fashioned after a foursquare (but they were two storeys). I'd personally call it a "hipped roof house."
If you have quite a few of them in your town, it makes you wonder if maybe a local lumberyard was selling the plans & lumber as kits.
I would call it a cottage rather than a bungalow - just my basic instinct. But calling it a bungalow is not necessarily "wrong" since it is a one-story structure and roughly of the style and period when bungalows were popular. It would be neat to know more about who built it and why, if it was built as a "development", and how it might have been marketed to folks in 1911.
My grandmother built a house almost identical to this about 1920. Mom always said that if they tore it down I should "get the chestnut out of it." One day I drove past and they were preparing to raze the property so I worked hard to recover "the chestnut." I thought it was in the trim, so I asked a cousin to dive in and rescue the trim. He got a lot of it, but examination reveal it to be all pine. It turned out the house FRAME was beautiful, solid, straight grain, no knot chestnut and ended up in a dumpster because no one would believe me. I cried.
I also have no idea what style our house is.. I do know it was built as a summer cottage but that's about it. There should be someone who you can pay to tell you this sort of thing!
We have the same house! Our's was built in 1920, is 730 sf, has two bedrooms separated by a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. There aren't any hallways and you can complete a circle walking from room to room. The foundation dimensions are 25x25 and we have a pyramid roof. Pretty neat!
Also, I actually took the architectural histroy class that lisacarol listed the syllabus for above when I attended Western Michigan University. Very cool, very popular class- small world!
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