Craftsman / Bungalow

A Craftsman bungalow is a one- or one-and-a-half-story house with a low-pitched gabled roof and wide eaves that overhang the walls. The ends of the roof rafters are left exposed under the eaves, and triangular wooden brackets support the overhang at the gable ends. A wide front porch sits under an extension of the main roof, carried on square columns that taper toward the top, often set on brick or stone bases. Windows are usually double-hung, with several small panes in the upper half over a single pane below.

Inside, the front door often opens straight into the living room, which has a fireplace and built-in bookcases, benches or cabinets. Pasadena's Bungalow Heaven district has more than 800 small Craftsman houses built between 1900 and 1930 and became a city landmark district in 1989. Chicago has about 80,000 bungalows, nearly a third of its single-family houses, though most are a local brick type rather than the wooden California model.

The name comes from The Craftsman, the magazine Gustav Stickley founded in October 1901, which published house plans along with articles on furniture and the Arts and Crafts movement. The word bungalow comes from Bengali and originally meant a house in the Bengal style. In Pasadena, the architect brothers Charles and Henry Greene designed large houses in the same manner, including the Gamble House (1908-1909).

The style was used for small and medium-sized houses in Southern California from about 1905. The one-and-a-half-story California bungalow was built widely across the United States from 1910 to 1925, and in Australia from 1910 to 1940. Mail-order companies sold houses as kits: Sears sold more than 70,000 kit houses, including bungalows, between 1908 and 1942, each shipped by railroad boxcar with about 30,000 parts, and competitors included Aladdin and Montgomery Ward. The Craftsman style remained popular into the 1930s.