Italianate

Italianate buildings are based on the villas and town palaces of Renaissance Italy. Roofs are low-pitched or flat, with wide eaves supported by large decorative brackets, often in pairs. Windows are tall and narrow, especially on the ground floor, with round or shallow-arched tops and heavy molded hoods. Many houses have a square cupola or a belvedere (a lookout room on the roof); about 15 percent of American Italianate houses have a tower. Cast iron and pressed metal made brackets and cornices cheap to produce, and many commercial blocks have cast-iron fronts.

John Nash's Cronkhill in Shropshire (about 1802) was the first Italianate villa in England. Prince Albert and the builder Thomas Cubitt designed Osborne House on the Isle of Wight (1845-1851) for Queen Victoria, with two belvedere towers. In the United States, Alexander Jackson Davis's Blandwood in Greensboro, North Carolina (1844) is the oldest surviving example, and Henry Austin's Victoria Mansion in Portland, Maine (1858-1860) has a four-story tower. Second Empire buildings share the brackets but add mansard roofs.

Italianate began in England as part of the Picturesque movement, which favored irregular buildings set among gardens and parkland. Nash's Cronkhill introduced it around 1802, Charles Barry developed it in the 1830s, and Osborne House, completed in 1851, was copied in Italianate villas throughout the British Empire. In the United States, Alexander Jackson Davis designed Italianate villas from the 1840s, and Andrew Jackson Downing's pattern books, starting with Cottage Residences (1842), which included designs by Davis, promoted the style to builders and homeowners.

The style was popular in the United States from the late 1840s to about 1890, and by the beginning of the Civil War it was more common than Greek Revival. Builders used it for detached houses, row houses and commercial buildings, where cast-iron fronts and bracketed metal cornices could be ordered from manufacturers. Davis's Litchfield Villa in Brooklyn (1854) is a later example of his work in the style. In the late 1870s Queen Anne and Colonial Revival designs began to replace it.