Cape Cod

A Cape Cod house is a low, wide, wood-framed house of one or one and a half stories, with a steep gable roof whose ridge runs parallel to the street. The front door is centered between multipane windows, and a large central chimney serves fireplaces in the rooms around it. Walls are covered in clapboard or cedar shingles, traditionally left unpainted to weather gray, and there is little decoration. Many 20th-century versions added dormer windows to light rooms in the attic.

The Hoyt-Barnum House in Stamford, Connecticut (about 1699), the oldest surviving house in that city, has a central chimney of fieldstone laid in clay mortar. Levittown on Long Island, New York, opened in 1947 with a Cape Cod model: a small one-floor house with an unfinished attic for later expansion. The saltbox, a related New England type, has two full stories in front and a long rear roof slope over one story at the back.

English settlers in New England built the first Cape Cod houses in the 17th century, adapting English building traditions to New England winters. The name came later: Timothy Dwight IV, president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, used it after visiting Cape Cod in 1800, and his account appeared in Travels in New England and New York (1821-1822).

A Cape Cod revival began in the 1920s, when magazines published the type as a model for small suburban houses. The Boston architect Royal Barry Wills (1895-1962), who opened his office in 1925, designed many of them. In 1938 Life magazine asked a Minnesota family to choose between his traditional design and a modern one by Frank Lloyd Wright; they chose Wills's, and it was built in Edina, Minnesota. After World War II, builders used the plan for low-cost houses for returning veterans. Levitt & Sons built 17,447 houses at Levittown between 1947 and 1951, starting with the Cape Cod model and switching to a ranch model in 1949. The revival ended around 1955, by which time the single-story ranch had become the most common new American house.