Design Inspiration. Room Ideas. How to Renovate. Shopping Guides. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. The 10 Best Plants for Fall Color. Typical Victorian windows were made up of six-paned later four-paned sliding sash windows with a single central glazing bar. Bay windows were extremely popular, either circular or rectangular, and many ground floor bay windows would have their own roof.
Bay windows have since been considered as one of the hallmarks of British architecture, with many houses of the era, whether detached or semi-detached featuring large bay windows on the front, flooding reception rooms with light. Victorian houses feature grand, high ceilings, giving the illusion of generous space, even in smaller terraced properties. With light and space being among the key criteria that home buyers look for , no wonder that this type of architecture has retained its popularity through to the present day.
The quality of wall and ceiling ornamentation was directly related to the status of the house, with different levels of embellishment across the board. Moulding adds form and shape to a room, a technique the Victorians employed widely in their interior design. Grand homes would have elaborate moulding with decorative details, ornate coving and intricate ceiling roses.
Source: Swoon Worthy. Open fires were the only form of heating in Victorian days, so most rooms would have their own fireplace. Surrounds could be stone, marble or wood, again with various levels of ornamentation, while terracotta chimney pots were a feature on roofs. The lack of any type of centrally distributed heating had an impact on room sizes too, making big open spaces unrealistic in more modest properties, while heavy curtains were commonly used to draughtproof single glazed windows.
Source: Country and Townhouse. The advent of the railways made the transportation of bricks from around the country possible, giving rise to a wealth of architectural opportunities. The style eventually filtered down to the middle class, and many of the more modest structures they built are still standing.
The Shingle Style is considered to be a completely original American style, with no direct European antecedents. The most common Victorian style is Folk Victorian. But the lower reaches of the middle class certainly shared the same Victorian urge to live in a fashionable house, and if they couldn't afford a professional architect, well. They could design the house themselves, or have a local carpenter do it.
In either case, the design was likely to be an unprofessional but possibly still charming pastiche, including elements of styles that were still currently fashionable among the upper crust, and elements of styles that definitely were not. Also, the house would naturally tend to be smaller and plainer than the what the wealthy could afford.
The result is Folk Victorian. This house is sort-of Gothic Revival in terms of its roof line and the two symmetric wings, but the center tower is vaguely like an Italianate villa, and there are some applied decorations that remind one of the Stick Style.
One could call it Queen Anne, since the Queen Anne is also ecclectic — but that is too simplistic. The classic Queen Anne is very elaborate compare this house with the two pictured in the Queen Anne section , and in terms of its complexity, this house is certainly closer in spirit to the Gothic or Stick styles than it is to the Queen Anne. There are no bay windows, no balconies, no overhangs on the second floor, etc. The exact division between Queen Anne and Folk Victorian is very fuzzy especially considering how many of the smaller Queen Annes were hodge-podged together by local carpenters, rather than designed by architects.
But, Folk Victorians were being built long before the Queen Anne style appeared on the scene, and in any case, it is still useful to make a rough distinction between the more expensive, very elaborate, architect-designed Victorians Queen Anne and their less-expensive, plainer, carpenter-designed cousins Folk Victorian.
There is some debate as to whether another style of the 's, Colonial Revival , is a true Victorian style, or the style which marks the end of the Victorian era. Whatever the case, Colonial Revivalism was certainly a reaction against the extremely elaborate houses which had come to symbolize the High Victorian period.
Colonial Revival houses looked back to the Federalist period for inspiration, and are characterized by simpler, more symmetric lines and much less gingerbread than most other 19th-century houses. The style had much in common with the Shingle Style, which began to appear at roughly the same time. Colonial Revivalism eventually evolved into the Four-Square and bungalow designs of the early 20th century. The interiors of Colonial Revival houses especially those built before the turn of the century are often very traditionally late Victorian, however.
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