1910-1930s

Arts and Crafts

1.5 stories

This style originated in Britain during the mid-19th century when the arts were combined with the crafts to produce high quality houses for the middle class. This style was popular in Britain from 1861-1914, but appeared later in the USA and was particularly popular in California, where the Greene brothers designed many, from hence it diffused eastward in the USA.

The Arts and Crafts style was expressed in the interior and exterior of houses. The glass work comes from the Corning Museum of Glass. On the outside, these have a rustic appearance with its steep gabled roofs, overhanging eaves, exposed crafters, and "earthy" building materials of wooden shingles, stucco, and field stones. Dormers and large front porches are common.

Arts and Crafts houses have these features:

stone, exterior chimney
small, high windows on each side of chimneys
dormers, usually gabled or shed
triangular knee brace supports
sloped foundations

fieldstones for accent on the house or along sidewalks

exposed roof beams and rafter tails or ends

Exposed rafter tails, roof beams, and triangular knee braces are very typical of Arts and Crafts houses. Dormers, on this and other house styles, come in many different forms (gable, eyebrow, hipped, polygonal, curbed, shed).

Arts and Crafts houses have front porches, which can be built of many different materials and in different forms. This style comes in many simple forms as well:

Arts and Craft details are again being used in suburban style houses from the 1980s and beyond, what we call Suburban Arts and Crafts and Ranch with Arts and Crafts details.

Created by Janet Robinson, 9 June 1997; last revised by Ingolf Vogeler on 06 June 2008.