Fanciful Queen Anne architecture takes on many shapes. Read below for features of the style. To see more pictures, visit our Queen Anne Photo Gallery.
Photo © 2005 Jackie Craven
Victorian Queen Anne Homes often have towers, turrets, wrap-around porches, and other fanciful details. This Queen Anne house is in Saratoga, New York.
Queen Anne houses have many of these features:
- Steep roof
- Complicated, asymmetrical shape
- Front-facing gable
- One-story porch that extends across one or two sides of the house
- Round or square towers
- Wall surfaces textured with decorative shingles, patterned masonry, or half-timbering
- Ornamental spindles and brackets
- Bay windows
About the Queen Anne style
Queen Anne became an architectural fashion in the 1880s and 1890s, when the industrial revolution brought new technologies. Builders began to use mass-produced pre-cut architectural trim to create fanciful and sometimes flamboyant houses.Not all Queen Anne houses are lavishly decorated, however. Some builders showed restraint in their use of embellishments. Still, the flashy "painted ladies" of San Francisco and the refined brownstones of Brooklyn share many of the same features.