Dutch Colonial

Dutch Colonial houses have a gambrel roof: each side has two slopes, a shallow upper slope and a steep lower one, which leaves room for a full upper floor under the roof. The lower edge of the roof often curves outward over the front and back walls. Houses in New York and New Jersey were built of fieldstone or brick, and many had a Dutch door, split horizontally so the top half can open while the bottom stays shut. Revival houses of the 20th century added long shed dormers.

The Dyckman Farmhouse in Inwood, Manhattan (about 1785), has walls of fieldstone and brick, white clapboard sections and a gambrel roof; it is the oldest surviving farmhouse on Manhattan. Frank Lloyd Wright's Warren McArthur House in Chicago (1892) is an early revival design with a gambrel roof. The gambrel is often called a Dutch roof, but it was used across colonial America: Harvard Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had one by 1677.

Dutch settlers came to New Netherland, the colony around present-day New York, from the 1620s, and settled the Hudson Valley, western Long Island and northern New Jersey. Their early houses were small stone buildings with steep roofs, and by about 1670 two-story houses with their gable ends to the street were common in New Amsterdam. England took the colony in 1664, but families of Dutch descent kept building in their own manner through the 1700s, with gambrel roofs, curved eaves and Dutch doors. The Dyckman Farmhouse, built about 1785 after the American Revolution, is a late example.

A Colonial Revival version became popular in the early 20th century, mostly in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware, and the name Dutch Colonial came into use between 1920 and 1925. Revival houses kept the gambrel roof and curved eaves and ranged from small two-story houses of about 1,400 square feet to three-story houses. Examples include the William E. Curtis House in Tampa, Florida (1905-1906). The revival lasted through the 1930s.