Bewilderingly beautiful would be a perfectly decent way to describe the sweep of architectural styles that have graced America’s growth from year to year and generation to generation.  And of course since Connecticut was here from the start, we can experience all those styles right in our own backyard.  In certain towns you can hop through house history within the distance of a few city blocks. There they are: Garrison and Gothic Revival, “Straight” Colonial and Colonial Saltbox, Federal, Greek Revival, and Victorian (Second Empire, Queen Anne, and “Folk.”) Then head out into the country and take a look at that real apple pie classic, the good old American farmhouse, built for use and comfort, not for show, but looking just fine anyway.  The “architectural” rule was: add rooms when necessary and make sure that you have a generous porch for the comfort and entertainment of family and visitors who might just stop by if they felt like it. All those terms do mean something and those styles were the purist reflection of what was happening in the times.  Then when the times (social and techno) changed, so did the houses.                                      

The Garrison Colonials of the 1600s were built as a stronghold against attack. An overhang on the second floor was provided with little holes so that the colonists could shoot right down at assailants. The small diamond paned windows were a holdover from medieval England.  Then in the 1700s, the “straight” colonial (We still build them in great numbers today) was expanded with a lean-to at the rear creating a long sloping roofline and mimicking the shape of colonial-era salt containers. These were of course called Saltboxes.  Down south they called that slope a “catslide.”  Federal was an American refinement of the rather ostentatious English Georgian mansion. A Federal style house would have two chimneys on either side of the house leaving room for a central hallway in addition to a fan shaped window over the doorway and “sidelight” windows flanking that doorway which in turn was protected by a small roof.  All of this of course was meant to impress (or intimidate) visitors.  The original American Mac Mansion!

And then there is that archetypical Platonic conceptual house, a small square one and a half story home with an evenly pitched roof first built in the 17th century and replicated again and again in the 20th.  Yes, I’m describing the ubiquitous Cape Cod. (Yale president Timothy Dwight created the name after seeing them on the Cape in 1800.) In contemporary real estate, the term is   “Colonial Cape.”  Mr. Dwight did not have to travel all the way to Cape Cod to see this house, there were plenty of them right here.    

After the Revolution, the newly minted U.S. of A. looked to the ancient Greeks as the originators of democracy and that led to the Greek Revival style.  In New England, wooden houses rather than stone and marble buildings paid homage to our Mediterranean political forbearers.  Just take a colonial, make the side (gable) end the front, add some columns and a wide band of trim framing the gable and you’ve got a compact and comfortable Greek temple.   

But all these classic houses had one thing in common.  They were all square built post and beam buildings.  Not much room for romance and imagination. 

By 1840, the new freedom of romance had transformed European music, poetry, and art in imaginative directions beyond the dreams of the classical.  In America the new freedom was economic.  New industries fueled a budding middle class often living in our first suburbs.  And now American writers and painters were expressing the romantic love of nature.  All of this spilled into and exuberant new type of house design called Carpenter’s Gothic or Gothic Revival.  By the early 19th century, the tyranny of the post and beam had been superseded by a lighter “balloon” house framing that could push structure beyond a simple, symmetrical, rectangular mold.  Then the scroll, band, and jigsaws enabled those carpenters to create elaborate “gingerbread” ornamentation that swirled up, down, and around the contours of the house.  American architecture was off to the races.

The house race went on in the Victorian age (1860 – 1900) with the Victorian style.  Victorian houses were not fueled by just bucks; they were fueled by major bucks, the wealth of the post civil war industrialist barons and industrialist robber barons.  Nothing exceeded like (decorative) excess!  When it came to house design the motto was “Anything Goes,” and so it went.  Balloon framing was carried out to the point of explosion with multiple gables, and dormers, sharply slanted, jaggedly shaped roofs, bay windows, porches, towers, turrets (square and round), shingles in all patterns and colors, and multicolored ornamentation beyond belief. Or for a little balance there was the classic flat mansard roof. “That being said,” we will have to say that our tasteful little state, although certainly not lax in the building of Victorian homes, didn’t even have a Newport, R.I., and therefore mostly escaped the greatest extremities of Victoriana.  After being seen as ugly eyesores for years, we now appreciate the not quite so underlying beauty of these “painted ladies.”  However, not described so far are the lovely and modest “Folk” Victorian homes still giving quiet shelter to families across the state.

By 1900, the muses of architecture heaved a sigh of relief and turned to the vast eclecticism of the 20th century.