Stick Style

Stick Style houses are wood-frame buildings with flat boards, called stickwork, nailed over the clapboard walls. The boards run vertically, horizontally and sometimes diagonally, dividing the walls into panels that imitate the exposed timber frames of medieval Tudor houses. Roofs are steep, with intersecting gables, and the gables often hold decorative trusses (triangular frameworks of boards). Eaves overhang on exposed brackets, and porches have diagonal braces between posts and roof. Plans are fairly simple, and most of the decoration is in the applied boards.

Richard Morris Hunt's John N. A. Griswold House in Newport, Rhode Island (1864), now a gallery of the Newport Art Museum, is considered a prototype of the style. Frank Furness's Emlen Physick Estate in Cape May, New Jersey (1879) has oversized brackets, chimneys and dormers with clipped gables. The style was also used for train stations and coastal life-saving stations. The Queen Anne houses that followed keep the steep gables but add towers, wraparound porches and mixed wall materials.

Stick Style developed in the United States in the 1860s from the Carpenter Gothic houses of the 1840s and 1850s, which Andrew Jackson Downing and other pattern-book authors had promoted. Carpenter Gothic houses already had steep gables and vertical board siding. Stick Style builders added a grid of applied boards to express the wooden frame on the outside of the walls. Hunt designed the Griswold House in 1864, after returning from his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and it was the first of his many buildings in Newport.

The style was used in the 1870s and 1880s for houses in resort towns such as Newport and Cape May, and for railway stations and life-saving stations along the coast. A variant called Stick-Eastlake, which combines stickwork with lathe-turned and carved trim, had modest popularity in the late 19th century, but few examples survive. By the 1890s Stick Style had evolved into the Queen Anne style, and the Shingle Style replaced its applied boards with walls of continuous wood shingles.