Shingle Style

Shingle Style houses are covered on walls and roofs with unpainted wood shingles, which run without a break over corners, towers and porches and carry little trim. Roofs are broad, often gambrel (two slopes on each side, the lower one steeper, as on a barn) or hipped, and come down low over porches. Towers are built into the main body of the house, and windows are often grouped in horizontal bands. Inside, a large living hall with a fireplace and staircase opens to the other rooms.

In Newport, Rhode Island, H. H. Richardson's William Watts Sherman House (1875-1876) is considered the prototype, and McKim, Mead and White's Isaac Bell House (1881-1883) is a museum. Richardson's Stoughton House in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1882-1883) and Peabody and Stearns's Kragsyde in Manchester-by-the-Sea (1883-1885, demolished 1929) are other examples, and Frank Lloyd Wright's own home in Oak Park, Illinois (1889) uses the style. Queen Anne houses mix clapboard, shingles and spindlework; Shingle Style houses use one material and almost no applied ornament.

The style developed in New England from the mid-1870s, when architects moved away from the applied ornament of Queen Anne toward the plain shingled walls of 17th-century colonial houses. Richardson's Watts Sherman House combined Norman Shaw's English models with these American sources. McKim, Mead and White, Peabody and Stearns and Richardson then built shingled summer houses in resort towns such as Newport, along with year-round houses such as the Stoughton House. McKim, Mead and White's William G. Low House in Bristol, Rhode Island (1886-1887), demolished in 1962, was covered by a single gable roof 140 feet long.

The style was used through the 1880s and 1890s and faded after about 1900. The architect John Horbury Hunt built shingled houses in Australia, including Pibrac (1888). The Yale historian Vincent Scully named the style in his 1949 doctoral dissertation and published The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright in 1955, tracing a line from these houses to Frank Lloyd Wright's early work.