Colonial Revival  / Early Revival (Old Colony Style)

Intro

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.