Edwardian

Edwardian houses keep the Victorian row house form, with bay windows, tall proportions and a cornice at the roofline, but use less ornament. In place of the turned spindles, towers and patterned shingles of late Victorian houses, they have plain classical trim such as columns and simple moldings. Window panes are larger, and paint colors are generally lighter. In San Francisco, a typical Edwardian building holds two or three flats, one per floor, with a flat front or a square-cornered box bay window.

San Francisco's Inner Mission North, around 16th and Valencia Streets, was rebuilt after 1906 in rows of similar flats and apartments. In Britain, Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, founded in 1906 by Henrietta Barnett and planned by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, has houses with individual gardens on tree-lined roads. Public buildings of the period used a heavier style, Edwardian Baroque, with domes, paired columns and heavily rusticated stone, as at Cardiff City Hall (1906) and Belfast City Hall (1906).

The style is named for Edward VII, who reigned in Britain from 1901 to 1910; the period is usually extended to the start of the First World War in 1914. Architects moved away from the dense ornament of late Victorian building toward simpler designs, drawing on Georgian architecture and the Arts and Crafts movement. For large public buildings, British architects revived the English Baroque of Christopher Wren, a style known as Edwardian Baroque.

In San Francisco, the earthquake and fires of April 18, 1906 destroyed about 25,000 buildings on 490 city blocks. Rebuilding was largely complete by 1915, in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and much of the housing built in those years is classed as Edwardian. The style also spread across the British Empire to Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. India has the largest group of Edwardian buildings outside the United Kingdom, including the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata.