Design Styles of the Victorian Homes.

Victorian House Gothic Design Style.

The Victorian Gothic Revival was the first of the Victorian Home Designs to impress Victorian America and considered by many to be the most important Victorian Design. The Victorian Gothic Home was introduced in America around 1840. Particular characteristics of this home design mirrored medieval castles, and cathedrals and its growth in popularity came simultaneously with romantic movements in all the arts, that is, simultaneously with the infamous Victorian taste for melodramatic music, plays, and novels. It was an odd Victorian who saw any essential difference between enjoying a romantic novel by Sir Walter Scott, set in a never-never land of knights and castles, or building an expensive house in that same style.

Characteristic of The Victorian Gothic Revival include steep pitched roofs, pointed-arches windows, elaborate verge board trim along the roof edges. High dormers, lancet windows and other traditional gothic details, and board and batten siding, that was often set on the vertical. A Majority of Victorian Gothic Revival homes populate New England. The more modest Victorian Homes were built by working-class Victorians that eventually spread from coast to coast. Early farmhouses in the Midwestern communities demonstrated extreme durability and exhibited Victorian home designs well in the 1940's.

The Italianate Victorian House Design.

The next style of Victorian Homes was the Italianate, taking its design features from the North Country villas of Northern Italy for its inspiration. This Victorian home design was characterized by a rectangular massing of the body of the house. This was done to achieve to imitate the sprawling look of the centuries-old villas in Italy. Of course this Victorian home style was enlarged from the much smaller Italian villas. This particular Victorian home design featured low-pitched roofs, sometimes flat. Heavy supporting under the eves, very often elaborate curved, and windows with heavy hoods or intricate surrounds. This Victorian style often features a square tower or cupola, in which it is sometimes referred to as 'Tuscan'.

Although very elegant and even grand Italianates are fairly common in the East, Midwest and on the West Coast, this particular Victorian style is fairly rare in the Deep South. The time of the greatest popularity for the style, the 1860's and 1870's, coincided with the economic devastation brought on by the Civil War, and there were few in the post-war South who could afford to build expensive new houses then.

The Second Empire Victorian Home Design.

Victorian Second Empire House Design became desirable around the same time as the Italianate, but its popularity was more sporadic geographically. Generally larger cities in the industrial Northeast and Midwest have more of these types of Victorian homes. Yet the smaller nearby cities have almost none. This particular Victorian house design is rarely seen in the South and on the west coast, and is also quite rare in the Rocky Mountain States.

Characteristics that make this Victorian house stand out are the mansard roof, which was almost always heavily designed with dormer windows that featured ornate decorative surrounds. Colored tile patterns on the roof and iron cresting were also incorporated. This Victorian style borrowed its inspiration from French architecture, which came to feature mostly the mansard roofs, named after the French Architect Francois Mansard, mostly as circumvention around Paris' building codes. The building codes limited buildings to a certain number of stories, but since the area directly under the roof was not considered to be a story, the mansard roof was a very effective way to expand the living space of a building and still remain within the law.

This particular Victorian home in America depicted the sole characteristic of the romantic style, which appealed to the Victorian upper crust, and they sometimes added corner quoins and belt courses and other decorative items to give the style even more of a Renaissance flavor. The Victorian second empire style was also known as The Renaissance Revival.

Queen Anne Victorian House Style.

The Queen Anne Victorian House is probably the most popular Victorian house design. This Victorian Home dominated Victorian residential architecture from about 1880 to1910. The Queen Anne Victorian home has become tantamount with the phrase 'Victorian House' to a majority of the public. This Victorian House features large projected bay windows, towers, turrets, and elaborate wrap around porches, often double porches, balconies, stained glass, roof finials and cresting, walls carvings and/or inset panels of stone or terra-cotta, cantilevered upper stories, acres of decorative trim, patterned shingles, belt courses, elaborate brackets, banisters and spindles. Even the chimneys on these Victorian homes are detailed in craftsmanship.

The Queen Anne style is vaguely related to 'Jacobean' architecture (Jacobean refers to English architecture during 1603 - 1625). This style featured textured surfaces on buildings, including decorative patterns made of wood or stone, and various colors of shingles and slate. The Queen Anne style started from this modest beginning and metamorphosed into the beautiful houses we admire today. This style is more original (more 'American', if you will) than the Gothic, Italianate, or Second Empire styles, because it is far more dynamic and pushed much further beyond its roots than did the other styles. It is a mystery where the 'Queen Anne' name comes from, because the architecture during the reign of the historic Queen Anne (1665 - 1714) has little in common with Jacobean architecture.

In addition to the many details of these Victorian homes, they were also painted a spectrum of different colors. During the period many dark colors were used or earth tones, reds, greens, burnt yellows, and browns.

However, subsequent generations mostly reverted to the all-white paint scheme that had characterized houses before the Civil War, and thus it came as a shock, nearly an outrage to some, when the 'Colorist' movement of the 1960's and 1970's set in, and a few people began painting their Victorian houses in rich colors again. The movement spread, and today (at least in some parts of some cities) Victorian houses sporting three or four bright colors are once again the norm rather than the outrageous exception. Relatively few modern homeowners try to duplicate original Victorian colors, partly for reasons of expense but mostly because bright colors are often preferred by modern eyes over the darker colors used by the Victorians.

The Stick Victorian Home Style.

This Victorian home style was popular from around 1860 to 1890 and is sometimes considered to be a high elaboration of the Gothic Revival Style and or considered to be a transition style between the Gothic Revival and the Queen Anne.

This Victorian House features small vertical, horizontal, or diagonal planks placed on top of the exterior walls. The style is often associated with houses featuring enormous, overhanging, second-story porches, sometimes called 'Swiss Chalet' houses.

The Exotic Victorian House Design.

Exotic Victorian Homes. Everyone wants to build something that's completely out of the norm. Exotic Victorian Homes accomplished this appeal. Octagonal Victorian houses, in particular became the transition from the traditional Victorian home. This particular design evolved through the efforts of one man, Orson Fowler, author of 'The Octagon House: A home for All', where he claimed that an eight sided house could claim more natural light and provide more ventilation between rooms, promoted an openness and made more efficient use of space. There are only a couple hundred exotic Victorian homes located between New York, New England, and the west coast.

Victorian Home Design Romanesque Revival.

Mainly contributed to architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, This Victorian Home style is built primarily in stone, and features massive rustic looking construction, along with heavy arches on the porches, windows and doors with a lack of applied decorative detail. His design became popular shortly after the Civil War and it enjoyed its rise in the 1880's when other architects began to design this Victorian style of their own.

This Victorian design was mainly used in designing public buildings; primary survivors are churches, university buildings, and public libraries. This style Victorian house, however, was enjoyed by the extremely wealthy. Several Revival mansions are built tin this Victorian style. These Victorian homes feature a complex floor plan complete with turrets, towers, and many gables.

Victorian Shingle Style Homes.

Covered completely in shingles, this Victorian home style was built from around 1880 to 1900. This particular Victorian home style features little to no decoration, complex roof line and roomy porches.

This Victorian home design catered to the wealthy vacation goers that vacationed by the sea in which they wanted to have a less formal and more rustic vacation getaway.

This Victorian home style eventually made its way to the middle class. The Victorian shingle style takes no credit from any other European home design. The Victorian Shingle Home Design stands on its own merit as all American.

Victorian House Design, Folk Victorian.

The Classic Folk Victorian home, still said by many to be the most popular out of all the Victorian home designs were created by professional architects and were built mainly by the wealthy. However, eventually the design became obtainable by the middle class who would in turn design their own Victorian homes. The middle class version of the Folk Victorian home was smaller, and plainer than what the wealthy were able to afford. Yet this Victorian Home still offered a charming cozy appeal.

The comparison between the Queen Anne Victorian Home and the Folk Victorian home is not completely defined. But, Folk Victorians were being built long before the Queen Anne style appeared on the scene, and in any case, it is still useful to make a rough distinction between the more expensive, very elaborate, architect-designed Victorians (Queen Anne) and their less-expensive, plainer, carpenter-designed cousins (Folk Victorian).

The Colonial Revival.

The Colonial Revival is a true Victorian style that marks the end of the Victorian era. This brought a new attitude towards color. Before then, the houses of the tract builders tended to be painted all one color, usually white, beige or gray. Later, many people were painting their houses in lighter, brighter colors. The vibrant colors are one of the more easily identifiable features of Victorian architecture today.