Colonial Revival / Early Revival (Old Colony Style)
Early Colonial Revival 1876–1915(Shingle Style, Free Classic, Old Colony Style)
The first waves of America’s most enduring architectural obsession . . . As the Victorian era drew to a close, nostalgic Americans looked to the architecture of the original Colonies for inspiration. Vernacular traditions (chiefly English, but also Dutch and German) were thrown into the mix, and everywhere the decorative vocabulary was that of 18th-century classicism.
House in Maine, ca. 1915: Its seacoast location, sprawling mass, and dark shingles connect it to the Shingle Style of earlier decades. But this house is more formally Colonial Revival with its prominent columns and balustrades.
The English Colonial Revival, which resulted in a national architectural vocabulary, was a movement with roots in Victorian-era Boston and Philadelphia. The “revival” encompassed every sort of replica and free adaptation of styles from the colonial, Federal, and Greek Revival periods (i.e., ca. 1670–1845). Colonial Revival houses were designed in a cluster of nostalgic sub-styles. Early on, Palladian windows, multi-light sash, broken pediments, and classical columns decorated large houses that retained Victorian-era massing with verandahs.
The rekindling of public interest in things Colonial dates to the 1876 Centennial, which opened the floodgates of patriotic sentiment and, among other things, focused attention on the rapid disappearance of original Colonial buildings. After that, architect Charles McKim and colleagues launched their seminal study tour of the old houses of New England. Their earnest photographing and sketching resulted in a “modern colonial style” of building: a studied vernacular of stained shingle walls, steep roofs, and classical ornament borrowed from Georgian buildings. (Since the 1950s, many of these houses have been labeled as Shingle Style.)
The vocabulary: Motifs used in pure, simplified, or mixed-up form include pedimented porticoes, columns, dentil mouldings, a modified Federal entry door with sidelights, and Palladian windows. This 1895 house is by Stanford White.
These new houses were not replicas, nor were they intended to be. They were often larger than the originals, not often symmetrical. Greek columns, Roman pilasters, and Palladian windows were used to great effect in 1900, as they were during the Georgian and Federal periods [in America, the 18th century to about 1840]. Other details of real Colonial houses came back into vogue as well, including multi-light window sash, heavy shutters, hipped roofs, fanlights, Adamesque mantels, and graceful staircases with turned balusters. The center hall plan returned. The traditions revived were mostly English, of course, but the Colonial Revival also absorbed Dutch and German ones.
FREE CLASSIC: The huge McFaddin–Ward House in Beaumont, Texas, is an especially memorable example of the bold “revival” houses built after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Designed by Beaux Arts architect Conrad Mauer in 1906 in a kind of fictionalized Southern Colonial style, the house is, according to Richard Guy Wilson, “one of the Deep South’s most prominent examples of columnitus giganticus.”
This 19th-century period encompasses the Shingle Style houses that were loosely based on New England vernacular forms. There was no attempt to be archaeologically correct; ornament from the Georgian and Federal periods (and even the Greek Revival) might coexist on the same asymmetrical house. Historian John Burrows has suggested the name Old Colonies Style for the nostalgic houses of the early revival, and particularly for their interiors, which often mixed iconographic “colonial” items such as a Windsor chair or spinning wheel with English art-movement wallpaper by William Morris and the odd piece of Arts and Crafts furniture.
NOSTALGIC: An apparently modest, shingle-sided cottage built in 1892 on Long Island and attributed to McKim, Mead and White, this one recalls the English gambrel roofs of southern New England.
Waves of Revival
The first wave
Pictured is the New Jersey Pavilion for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Based on George Washington’s headquarters at Morristown, this example from the end of the Victorian period added a ceremonial Georgian pediment—and a Victorian wrap-around verandah.
Transitional
This typical Foursquare house has Colonial Revival details like the front door with sidelights (but no fanlight above), corner pilasters, and a modified Palladian window. Houses of this era often had classical or “colonial” features grafted onto Queen Anne or transitional house forms. These are not Colonial replicas. But they are no longer Victorian.
Academic
Pictured is The Beverly, “A Stately Colonial Home,” from the 1927 Montgomery Ward catalog. Sales copy points to the Colonial windows and quaint entrance. Despite the obvious 20th-century date of this dwelling (and the fact that it’s being marketed to the middle class), this example, like most built from 1910 through the 1930s, is more academically correct that the transitional revival houses had been. The emphasis is on not only classical details but also the rectilinear, symmetrical forms of the 18th century. Many such houses build during the 1920s boom survive across the nation. The Colonial Revival reappeared after the Second World War, along with both formal classical and Early American interiors.
The Colonial Revival Interior
The grand entrance hall is a Colonial Revival standard. In interior design, Colonial Revival surpassed even the French Louis styles prior to the First World War. For most people, it was an affectation more than it was historically accurate; only the wealthy clients of decorators got actual period rooms. The familiar stage-set Colonial appeared early on: the rocker, the Windsor chair, the dressing table set with an antique shaving glass.
But even die-hard Colonial Revivalists were not that interested in accuracy; after all, they were borrowing motifs from a narrow field of the richest colonial citizens. The Revival imitated only fine houses; rustic objects may have been placed as icons, but in general, that which was poor, primitive, or dirty about real colonial life was ignored.
At the turn of the century, rooms with well-placed antiques were stripped of clutter, and simplified by the use of one paint color and one fabric pattern. The very Victorian center table was pushed into a corner. Chippendale-style chairs and a neoclassical mirror were brought in. Wallpaper was lighter in color: florals on pale backgrounds and stripes were most popular. Ceilings were usually left unornamented.
Neo-Georgian woodwork painted high gloss white: a Colonial Revival room. The ca. 1900 parlor decoration would have been so considered, even though only the chair in the center is actually a revival piece. Striped wallpaper was used in both “colonial” and French rooms. Gone are Victorian “art units”; instead pictures hung directly on walls are arranged symmetrically. Note the 1870s side chair reupholstered in chintz. American orientals cover most of the floors. NOTE: Interior views are after actual period photographs annotated by William Seale.
English Sheraton-inspired reproduction furniture fills this ca. 1900 attempt at a true period room. Paintings atop busy wallpaper, different upholstery fabrics, and the cluttered curios indicate lingering Victorian taste. But the paper’s light background is typical of the Colonial Revival.
In a city house probably of the 1890s, high wainscoting, which might have been polished oak in a similar house, is here painted colonial white. The stair, Federal in its elliptical curve, is nevertheless given early 18th century balusters, probably copied from a New England restoration. A wrought-iron lantern on the newel imitates a cresset. The funniest piece is the mahogany settle. Its Chippendale feet and arms and giant pedimented back illustrate the tendency of revivals to exaggerate appealing features of the original to the point of distortion.
Most of the major furniture styles of the 18th and early 19th centuries—Chippendale, Queen Anne, William and May, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and American Empire—were revived by 1900. Some pieces were fairly accurate reproductions, although no Revival furniture maker was above mixing the best of different styles. A Pilgrim substyle appeared in the 1890s and was still popular for informal use into the 1930s.
In any given room, furniture was rarely all of a style or era. Eastlake pieces were still popular. Grand Rapids furniture of the Golden Oak period was stripped of applied ornament and painted with white enamel. The very popular Arts and Crafts style was not to be ignored; in fact, it was the most popular style between 1893 and 1910.
By the end of the 1890s, however, the rich were back to historical revival styles. There was a revival of 18th century Queen Anne furniture, chosen by the middle class as a more livable alternative to the formal revivals (including the Greek-derived American Empire style) yet not so informal as Arts and Crafts. Queen Anne furniture in black walnut, oak, or mahogany included panels of woven cane and loose cushions. Mahogany was thought to look best with white woodwork, especially in bedrooms.
Historian John Burrows has suggested the name Old Colonies Style for the nostalgic, transitional houses of the early revival, and particularly for their interiors, which often mixed iconographic “colonial” items such as a Windsor chair or spinning wheel with English art-movement wallpaper by William Morris and the odd piece of Arts and Crafts furniture.
This period marked the end of the tripartite division of walls into dado, fill, and frieze. Now there might be a dado or a frieze but rarely both. Raised-panel or other wainscot was still used in halls, dining rooms, and libraries. Large pictures still hung on exposed ropes from hooks on the picture rail, but smaller frames were now fastened invisibly to the wall.
For nearly 75 years, woodwork had been dark and massive. In the early days of the revival, raised-panel woodwork was often varnished. Houses built in the Colonial Revival style had simpler woodwork, often painted in a glossy off-white know as colonial ivory; more accurate soft greys came even later. The white woodwork craze can be traced to the White City at the Chicago Fair in 1893, where it was decreed by the planners of the City Beautiful that all buildings would be white, inside and out. Georgian-era buildings, of course, had been painted in greys and grey greens, even blue and gold, but the public association between classical and white had been made.
Ivory paint on neo-Colonial woodwork is a convention of the Colonial Revival. This house is by Stanford White.
Primary and secondary hues were replacing late-Victorian tertiaries as early as 1890. Contrast schemes were used throughout the 19th century, even in the last decade. But analogous and occasionally even monochromatic schemes were also advised in the last quarter.
With the lighter woodwork, pastels came back for the first time since the early 1800s. Wallpaper patterns tended to the floral, similar to designs of the 1850s, their realistic representations of lace, medallions, statuary, and metalwork antithetical to the Art Movement. Even embossed Lincrusta-Walton wallcovering, for decades finished in deep browns and maroons, was shown in ivory and gold at the Fair. Federal Revival houses dressed in delicate ceiling medallions, classical cornices, and Adam style mantels would have walls painted in light blues or apricots. Federal era reproduction wallpapers were widely available.
Polished wood floors and scatter rugs have come to be associated with colonial decorating, but they are actually Colonial Revival. Large carpets were sent out to be cut up and bound as rugs; reproduction oriental carpets were common. “The chintz decorator,” Elsie de Wolfe, mad it clear in her best-selling The House in Good Taste (1910) that chintz was particularly appropriate for Colonial Revival interiors. (Chintz is a glazed cotton, usually with at least five colors and frequently in large floral patterns.) The lightweight and affordable fabric was a reminder of those 18th-century days when curtains were functional and an accent rather than an overwhelming presence.
Chintz was often the only pattern used in a given room. Light colors were recommended for bedrooms; the black chintzes suitable for public rooms were reproductions of 1830s fabrics. Elsie de Wolfe was big on valances, 10 to 12 inches deep or of a length equal to one full repeat of the pattern. Ruffles were for summer cottages and bedrooms. Fitted valances in chintz or brocade, she said, were more suitable in the drawing room. By the teens, interior light had changed with electricity; any dark corners remaining were swept clean and colors got brighter. Even the middle class was adopting bareness and restraint.
Recommended Books
The Colonial Revival House
by Richard Guy Wilson: Abrams, 2004.
The early years of the Colonial Revival in America and its motifs closely overlap those of the Shingle Style. This is a one-of-a-kind, smart, beautiful volume that includes 275 photos for inspiration.
Colonial Revival Maine
by Kevin Murphy: Princeton Architectural Pres, 2005
A regional take on the development of a new colonial style (i.e., the Shingle Style) by late-Victorian architects. Classical and colonial influences are evident in architect-designed “summer cottages” in Maine’s seaside resorts. Period drawings and archival photos of interiors (very helpful!) are accompanied by exterior views and new photos.
The Houses of McKim, Mead & White
by Samuel G. White: Universe, 2004.
The pre-eminent firm is best known for their Beaux Arts classicism and their public commissions. Seminal, too, were the early houses of MMW and especially those of Stanford White, built for wealthy Easterners during the Gilded Age. From 1879 to 1912, the firm designed over 300 houses in places like Newport, the Hudson Valley, and Long Island. Here we see exteriors and rooms inside.
Colonial Style
by Treena Crochet: Taunton, 2005
Decorating ideas for three house styles, whether renovated or built new: traditional colonials, Cape Cods, and Saltboxes. Includes information on concealing anachronisms like TVs and microwave ovens. Period details explained. Very basic text and an eye toward renovation rather than restoration, but the photos are pretty.
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Hallmarks |
| Variants |
Interiors |
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