what it is
In the United States, Queen Anne is the name for asymmetrical late Victorian houses, most built between 1880 and 1910. Typical features are a steep roof with a large front-facing gable, a round, square or polygonal tower, bay windows and oriels (bay windows that project from an upper floor), and a porch that covers part or all of the front and often wraps around the side. Wall materials change from floor to floor, typically clapboard below and patterned wood shingles above. Porches carry spindlework, rows of small lathe-turned wooden posts.
Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom built the Carson Mansion in Eureka, California (1884-1886) of redwood for the lumber businessman William Carson. Matthew Kavanaugh built the row of houses facing Alamo Square in San Francisco in 1892-1896, now among the city's Painted Ladies. Brooklyn's Astral Apartments (1885-1886) are a brick and terracotta example. British Queen Anne houses, the source of the name, are mostly red brick with white-painted sash windows; most American examples are wood-framed.
how to spot one
history
The name comes from England, where Richard Norman Shaw, George Devey and other architects of the 1860s and 1870s designed red-brick houses that mixed English forms of the 17th and early 18th centuries. The label refers to the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), though the houses copied little from it. Shaw's drawings of his houses in Surrey, published in 1874, shaped H. H. Richardson's William Watts Sherman House in Newport, Rhode Island (1875-1876). In New York, Sidney V. Stratton's building for the New York House and School of Industry (1878) introduced the British version to the city.
American builders turned it into a wooden style with towers and large porches, using factory-made trim. Pattern books spread it across the country: George F. Barber of Knoxville, Tennessee, sold more than 20,000 mail-order house plans between 1887 and 1908, many of them Queen Anne, and houses from his plans stand in all 50 states. The style's popularity waned in the early 1900s, and Barber's own later catalogs moved to Colonial Revival designs. Wraparound porches continued on new houses into the 1920s.
where to find it
San Francisco's Painted Ladies, Cape May in New Jersey, and Victorian neighborhoods in nearly every older U.S. town.
easy to confuse with
