How to Identify a Victorian House
Victorian homes are the closest we have gotten in the US (to date) to the spun-sugar confections of many European homes. Sweet and elaborate, it is my personal favorite style of home.
Thanks to new advances in manufacturing and rail travel, the late 1800s in the US saw enormous growth in a newly accessible type of luxury. While some homes of the era are grand sprawling mansions, there are many more fairly modest homes in the style. Though they fell out of favor in the 1920s, the charm of Victorian homes roared back in the 70s and have been back in favor since. Here are some tell-tale signs a home is a bona fide Victorian (even if we were technically in the Edwardian period by then 😉).
Common Exterior Features
A fine example of a middle class Victorian home in Aspen, Colorado
Irregular Roof Line
This is absolutely the most tell-tale sign of whether or not a home is from the Victorian era. Thanks to the then-new technique of balloon framing - a type of house framing we still use today - homes in the Victorian era have fantastical roofs that refuse to conform to a single, simple shape. Even the yellow house above has an L-shaped roof with an additional roof line over the porch and bay window - relatively tame for this period.
Though houses from the transition out of Victorian style will have many of the other features in this post, they will have more simple roofs. Dutch revival roofs were really popular during the transition from Victorian to craftsman homes in the 1910s. The key difference between transitional homes and earlier homes is that the main roof is all one level and direction, and the home’s layout is in a simple rectangular shape, rather than the L-shaped or irregular layouts from earlier in the time period.
This cotton candy beauty in Curtis Park, Denver, Colorado has gingerbread trim, Richardsonian stonework, and layered shingles common in the era.
Porches Everywhere
While a Queen Anne-style home (more on that later) with a wraparound porch is the most famous visual from this era, even the most subdued Victorian home has, at minimum, a small stoop with lovely spindles. In accordance with the social tradition of accommodating your callers, a stoop to shield them from inclement weather was an absolute must.
Elaborate Trim
Commonly referred to as “gingerbread trim” due to the elegant, saccharine lines, Victorian homes are perhaps most recognizable by these touches. While more moneyed examples of these homes have towers, stained glass, and other over-the-top touches, even the smallest Victorian homes have layered round shingles, elegant molding around the windows, and light, decorative spindles and railings on their porches and stoops.
Common Interior Features
This fireplace has modern styling, but the small hearth, tiled surround, and ornate mantle are classic examples of fireplaces from the period. Photo by Gabriele Rampazzo on Unsplash
Multiple Front Rooms
Social conventions of Victorian era were paramount, and therefore each house often had multiple rooms for entertaining and welcoming guests. In general, the farther to the back of the house, the more intimate and casual the room. Even a smaller Victorian house will typically have a front room/parlor, then a formal dining room, and a family room/den closer to the kitchen.
Tiny Kitchens
Speaking of kitchens, because they were largely used only by staff (even middle-class families often had a cook or maid) kitchens were small, spare, and with none of the adornment of other rooms. Even if you couldn’t afford staff, kitchens still had a private status, as they were the center of labor. Social norms dictated that you keep those “dirty” parts of your life behind closed doors. In even a 6,000 square foot mansion, a kitchen may be only 12 by 12 feet or so, with less than 5 feet of counter space. Kitchens always had a back door as well. Typically staff, deliveries, and close friends/neighborhood children would use the back door, with formal callers using the front.
Bathrooms at the Back
Since indoor plumbing was brand new, many of the homes at this time had bathrooms at the back of the home. This was for two reasons: it was the easiest place to add on a vulgar addition such as a water closet (if the home predated indoor plumbing), and because then the kitchen and bathroom could share plumbing. Famously, an 1880s Victorian in Colorado added a flush toilet… in a separate building accessible via rope bridge on the other side of a steep ravine. Later homes typically had a bath upstairs (luxury!) and a bath at the back.
Picture Rail
While many of the elaborate touches of outside carried inside, such as ornate light fixtures and green-tiled fireplaces (thanks to a now-obsolete lead-based paint, green was massively en vogue in this era), a picture rail is a subtler sign that the home is likely from the era.
Down about a foot or two from the ceiling, a thin piece of trim was affixed parallel to the floor in most front rooms. Thanks to advances in manufacturing and photography, most people had framed pictures to display for the first time in their lives, and so they hung them on wires from the picture rails. Picture rails have the added benefit of making your ceilings appear taller.
Major Types
Eastlake
Eastlake homes can be found all over California. Photo by David Vives on Unsplash
English designer and architect Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, first published in 1868, was quite popular in England in the late 19th century. After its first printing in Boston in 1872, and its feature at the centennial celebration in 1876, Eastlake’s ideas took off in the US like wildfire.
The popularity of Eastlake’s ideas blended beautifully with the brand new manufacturing and distribution capabilities in the US at the time. Previous furniture styles were heavy, expensive, and difficult to both procure and care for. Eastlake advocated for lighter, more practical furniture. The geometric and sunburst adornments were both visually pleasing and easy to reproduce by manufacturers.
Eastlake houses are characterized by an experimental quality. There is less uniformity among the features than in later houses, and the trademark irregular layouts weren’t quite so irregular yet. Eastlake homes can be more irregular in exterior shape, but more ambitious in their styling. Also, because of Eastlake’s emphasis on geometry, they tend to have more squared edges than later styles.
One of the most famous examples of an eastlake house? None other than Halliwell Manor, a.k.a. the house from Charmed.
Queen Anne
This pink east coast confection is a stereotypical example of a Queen Anne Victorian. Photo by Jim Witkowski on Unsplash
This is almost certainly what you picture when you think of a Victorian home. Queen Annes exemplify everything about a Victorian home to the extreme - they often have multiple porches, balconies, towers, and oriels (oriels are towers that stick out from an upper story rather than connecting all the way down). Today, they are often painted bright, pastel colors to highlight the whimsy of the structure. While they are often highly shingled, they can be built of brick as well.
This is the least-defined of the styles of the Victorian era. It often has design overlap with some beaux arts, italianate, and neo-gothic structures, but they lack the precise distinguishing characteristics of those architectural styles. The main feature uniting these homes is their over-the-top grandiosity. Bursting with detail, every inch of the home is decorated generously.
It should be noted that this style came about over a full century after Queen Anne lived, and has absolutely no historical or visual tie to the architecture during her life. More likely, the name comes from the houses’ resemblance to the frothy, delicate flower, Queen Anne’s lace.
Richardsonian-Romanesque
One of the most unique style of homes from this period, Richardsonian-Romanesque houses were especially popular in the American West, where wood was scarce. It was a hugely popular style for churches, schools, museums, and municipal buildings of the late 1800s, but there were plenty of homes in this style as well. It all started with architect Henry Hobson Richardson’s project the Richardson Olmsted Complex, a psychiatric institution (that has long been defunct and is being restored as a hotel). Fun fact, the “Olmsted” in the name refers to Frederick Law Olmsted, a wildly popular landscape architect who designed hundreds of parks and grounds in the US, including Central Park in NYC (ever heard of it??).
In domestic architecture, this style is a distinct subset of Victorian architecture. There is significant overlap in this style with the gothic revival happening at the same time. The “Richardsonian” part is obvious (Henry Richardson), but where does Romanesque come from? Well, Rome. The Italianate style was also very popular during this period, but Romanesque architecture is distinct. It’s not influenced by the florid villas of Italy, but the cut stone forts of Rome.
The footprint of an RR home is often similar to other homes in the period, from sprawling Queen Annes to more modest family homes. The devil, as they say, is in the details. RR homes are typically built with a combination of brick and stone, rather than a shingled façade. Even a brick RR home will be trimmed with large blocks of rough-hewn stone (the most sure tell-tale sign of an RR home). They often have stone-trimmed arched windows rather than plain rectangular ones. Though many have been painted over in bright colors (such as the pink and purple home in the previous section), they were originally left natural in shades of warm red-brown and green. If you’re picturing the Victorian house where a murder is committed in the library, look no further.
I don’t have any (legal) photos to share, so check out this explanation on Circa houses for great examples from the period.
I am not an architect or an architecture historian, but an amateur (and college history major) with a lot of love and a copy of A Field Guide to American Houses (not an affiliate link). Keep in mind, too, that many homes of this era have elements borrowed from all the things listed! For example, many Colorado Victorian homes have Romanesque touches (even if they’re not strictly in that style) because Romanesque homes use more stone than wood, and stone is more plentiful and practical in the Rocky Mountain High.
The photos and details in this post are centered around my current home of Denver, Colorado, but you can see some amazing Victorian homes in Washington, Oregon, California, Atlanta (particularly Kirkwood), Montana, Massachusetts, Upstate New York, and throughout the midwest (MSP and Detroit have some of my faves!).
