Half-Timbered

A half-timbered building has a load-bearing frame of heavy timbers, usually oak, left visible on the outside. The spaces between the timbers, called panels, are filled with wattle and daub (woven sticks covered in clay) or, later, with brick, known as nogging. Joints are cut by hand and fixed with wooden pegs, with allowance for the green timber to shrink as it dries. Upper floors are often jettied, projecting out over the floor below, and diagonal braces form chevrons, crosses and diamond patterns on the facade.

Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, built in stages between about 1504 and 1610, has two jettied upper floors on its south range, chevron and lozenge bracing and about 30,000 leaded window panes. The Shambles in York has timber-framed shops from about 1350-1475 whose upper floors overhang the street. Quedlinburg in Germany has more than 1,200 half-timbered houses, and in Alsace, Colmar and Strasbourg have whole streets of them. In Germany the technique is called Fachwerk, and in France colombage.

Half-timbering was a common building method across northern and western Europe from the Middle Ages, used for town houses, inns, guild halls and barns. There was no single originator; carpenters in England, France, Germany and the Low Countries each developed regional framing patterns. Wattle and daub was the earliest infill, and brick replaced it as brick production increased. Jettied upper floors appeared in England in the 13th century and were built until the 16th century. Early surviving examples include a barn at Cressing Temple in Essex, dated about 1205-1235, and a house in Bernkastel on the Moselle dated 1417.

In England the method gave way to brick and stone during the 17th century; in London, the Rebuilding Act passed after the Great Fire of 1666 required new houses to be built of brick or stone. In the late 1860s Richard Norman Shaw revived half-timbered gables at Cragside in Northumberland, starting the Tudor Revival. In Tudor Revival houses in Britain and the United States, the timbers are usually thin boards applied over brick, stucco or a stud frame rather than a load-bearing structure.