Neo-Eclectic

Neo-Eclectic houses combine details from several historical styles on one modern wood-framed house. A single front may have a steep Tudor-style gable with false half-timbering, Colonial-style shutters, a Palladian window (an arched window between two narrower rectangular ones) and a Mediterranean arch. Common features are complex roofs with many intersecting gables and hips, tall two-story entrances, and thin veneers of brick, stone or stucco over the frame. Moldings that would once have been stone or plaster are usually foam with a stucco coating.

Builders also offer versions closer to one source, which Virginia and Lee McAlester's field guide groups as Neo-Tudor, Neo-French, Neo-Mediterranean and Mansard. The Mansard type has a shingled false mansard roof (a steep roof slope that forms the upper wall). Large Neo-Eclectic houses, often over 3,000 square feet with oversized garages, are known as McMansions. Mediterranean and Spanish details are most common in California; Colonial and Georgian details are most common in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states.

Neo-Eclectic building has no single originator. In A Field Guide to American Houses (1984), Virginia and Lee McAlester used the term for houses built from about 1965 that returned to historical styles. The Mansard type appeared in the 1960s, adapting the French Second Empire roof with modern materials such as asbestos and cedar shingles and aluminum siding, and simplified Neo-Colonial and Neoclassical houses followed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Exterior insulation and finish systems (EIFS), foam boards coated with a stucco-like finish, made it easy to add arches, moldings and stone-like trim to inexpensive frames. The term McMansion was in use by the early 1980s and appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990. In 2014, 32 percent of new American houses had at least 3,000 square feet. During the 2010s, the McMansion lost favor with many buyers, and simpler modern-influenced designs, sometimes called McModern, gained ground.