From Jackie Craven,
Your Guide to Architecture.
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Of all the Victorian house styles, Queen Anne is the most elaborate and the most eccentric. The style is often called romantic and feminine, yet it is the product of a most unromantic era -- the machine age.

Queen Anne became an architectural fashion in the 1880s and 1890s, when the industrial revolution was building up steam. North America was caught up in the excitement of new technologies. Factory-made, precut architectural parts were shuttled across the country on a rapidly expanding train network. Exuberant builders combined these pieces to create innovative, and sometimes excessive, homes.

Also, widely-published pattern books touted spindles and towers and other flourishes we associate with Queen Anne architecture. Country folk yearned for fancy city trappings. Wealthy industrialists pulled out all stops as they built lavish "castles" using Queen Anne ideas.

Although easy to spot, the Queen Anne style is difficult to define. Many are lavished with gingerbread, but some are made of brick or stone. Many have turrets, but this crowning touch is not necessary to make a house a queen. So, what is Queen Anne?

What Makes a Queen?

Fanciful and flamboyant, Queen Anne architecture takes on many shapes. Some Queen Anne houses are lavishly decorated. Others are restrained in their embellishments. Yet the flashy "painted ladies" of San Francisco and the refined brownstones of Brooklyn share many of the same features. There is an element of surprise to the typical Queen Anne home. The roof is steeply pitched and irregular. The overall shape of the house is asymmetrical.

Virginia and Lee McAlester, authors of A Field Guide to American Houses, identify four types of detailing found on Queen Anne homes.

1. Spindled (See photo)
This is the style we most frequently think of when we hear the term "Queen Anne." These are "gingerbread" houses with delicate turned porch posts and lacy, ornamental spindles. This type of decoration is often called Eastlake because it resembles the work of the famous English furniture designer, Charles Eastlake.

2. Free Classic (See photo)
Instead of delicate turned spindles, these homes have classical columns, often raised on brick or stone piers. Like the Colonial Revival houses that would soon become fashionable, Free Classic Queen Anne homes may have Palladian windows and dentil moldings.

3. Half-Timbered
Like the early Tudor style houses, these Queen Annes have decorative half-timbering in the gables. Porch posts are often thick.

4. Patterned Masonry (See photo)
Most frequently found in the city, these Queen Annes have brick, stone, or terra-cotta walls. The masonry may be beautifully patterned, but there are few decorative details in wood.

Queen Anne Features

A list of Queen Anne features can be deceptive. Queen Anne architecture is not an orderly or easily classified. Bay windows, balconies, stained glass, turrets, porches, brackets, and an abundance of decorative details combine in unexpected ways.

Moreover, Queen Anne details can be found on less pretentious houses. In American cities, smaller working-class homes were given patterned shingles, spindlework, extensive porches, and bay windows. Many turn-of-the-century houses are in fact hybrids, combining Queen Anne motifs with features from earlier and later fashions.

Queen Who?

Even the history of the Queen Anne style is bewildering. These homes were built in the late 1800s, during the age of England's Queen Victoria. So, why are the houses called Queen Anne?

Popular during the time of Britain's Queen Victoria, Queen Anne architecture has little to do with the 16th century Queen Anne. Moreover, the exuberant Queen Anne style bears little resemblance to the formal architecture that was popular during the 1700s when Queen Anne reigned. Builders and homeowners named the style Queen Anne because they associated the historical queen with elegance and grandeur.

Endangered Queens

Ironically, the very qualities that made Queen Anne architecture so regal also made it fragile. These expansive and expressive buildings proved expensive and difficult to maintain. By the turn of the century, Queen Annes had fallen out of favor. In the early 1900s, architects favored smaller Edwardian ("Princess Anne") and more austere Colonial Revival styles.

While many Queen Annes have been preserved as private homes, others have been converted into apartment houses, offices and inns. In San Francisco, flamboyant homeowners have painted their Queen Annes a rainbow of psychedelic colors. Purists protest that bright colors are not historically authentic. But the owners of these "Painted Ladies" claim that Victorian architects would be pleased.

Queen Anne designers did, after all, relish decorative excesses.