Modern Farmhouse

Modern Farmhouse houses use the outline of the traditional American farmhouse, a plain gabled block often with a front porch, finished with modern materials. Typical exteriors have white board-and-batten siding (vertical boards with narrow strips covering the joints) or white horizontal siding, black window frames, and standing-seam metal roofs, made of metal panels joined by raised vertical seams. Inside, plans are open, with large kitchens, exposed wood beams, shiplap wall boards and sliding barn-style doors.

Most examples are builder houses in new subdivisions rather than architect-designed landmarks. The best-known are the houses in and around Waco, Texas, renovated by Chip and Joanna Gaines for the HGTV series Fixer Upper. Compared with the Craftsman houses of the 1910s and 1920s, which have low-pitched roofs, exposed rafter ends and earth-toned paint, Modern Farmhouse uses steeper and plainer gables, little exterior trim, and black-and-white color schemes.

Modern Farmhouse has no single designer. Its forms come from the wood-framed farmhouses of rural America, with gabled roofs, porches and painted siding, and from the barns and metal-roofed outbuildings around them. The style took shape in the early 2010s. HGTV's Fixer Upper, in which Chip and Joanna Gaines renovated houses in Waco, Texas, premiered in 2013 and ran until 2018, and it is widely credited with popularizing farmhouse interiors with shiplap, wainscoting and barn doors.

The Gaineses opened Magnolia Market at the Silos, a shop and garden complex in Waco, in October 2015; it draws more than a million visitors a year. A 2018 Zillow report found that homes listed with features associated with the show, such as shiplap and barn doors, sold for about 30 percent more than expected. Through the late 2010s and the 2020s, production builders applied the exterior formula of white siding, black windows and metal roofs to new houses across the United States.