What Style Is My House? How to Identify an Old House's Architectural Style and Age

Knowing your house's style does two jobs. It gives you the right words to search with, so you can find comparable houses, survey forms, and catalog designs, and it gives you a rough date range before you open a single deed book. A Greek Revival front-gabled house with a wide band of trim under the eaves almost certainly predates the Civil War; a low, wide house with the garage under the main roof is almost certainly postwar. This guide walks through the major American house styles in roughly chronological order, the features that identify each, and the construction clues (windows, floor plans, nails, and framing) that help you narrow the date. It ends with where to take what you find.

1. What Style Can and Cannot Tell You

Each style had a period of peak popularity, and style guides publish date ranges for each. Those ranges are useful but soft, for three reasons. First, regional lag: fashions often reached small towns and rural areas years after they appeared in pattern books and big cities, so a style can linger well past its listed end date. Second, remodeling: a Victorian house may have been given a Colonial Revival porch in the 1920s, or a farmhouse may have gained Italianate brackets when the family prospered. Third, vernacular houses: most American houses were built by local carpenters with little or no stylistic decoration. The Texas Historical Commission's survey training notes that "no style," with a few borrowed details, is more common in the real world than any textbook style. For those houses, the overall form and floor plan matter more than ornament.

Use style to form a hypothesis, then test it against the documentary record described in our guide to finding the year your house was built.

2. The Standard References

The book nearly every preservation office uses is A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia and Lee McAlester, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1984. A revised and expanded edition by Virginia Savage McAlester came out from Knopf in 2013, adding houses built in the decades since the first edition along with hundreds of new photographs and drawings. Look for the 2013 edition if you have a postwar house. Most public libraries own it. Its style names and dates are the ones used in many state survey manuals, including the Texas Historical Commission's style summary.

Free online alternatives:

• Pennsylvania Architectural Field Guide from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, with a page for each style, a list of identifying features, and photographs. It is an archived 2015 snapshot that is no longer updated, but the content is sound and covers the 1700s through the 1960s.
• Texas Historical Commission residential styles summary (PDF), a compact illustrated chart of styles with dates and key features, based on the McAlester guide.
• National Park Service Preservation Briefs. Brief 17, Architectural Character (Lee H. Nelson, 1988), teaches you how to read a building's visual character, and Brief 35, Understanding Old Buildings: The Process of Architectural Investigation (1994), explains how professionals work out how a building changed over time.
• Other state historic preservation offices publish their own guides, such as Virginia's Department of Historic Resources style guide for postwar buildings and Colorado's Guide to Colorado's Historic Architecture and Engineering. Search your own state historic preservation office's website for "architectural style guide."

3. A Field Guide to American House Styles

Date ranges below come from the Pennsylvania Architectural Field Guide and the Texas Historical Commission summary; where the two differ, both are given. Expect your local dates to run later than these.

Colonial and early republic (1700s to about 1830)

• Georgian (about 1700–1800). Symmetrical front, usually five openings across with a center door; side-gabled or hipped roof; multi-pane sash windows with 6 to 20 panes per sash; paneled door under a transom, often with a pediment and pilasters; dentils at the cornice.
• Federal or Adam (about 1780–1820). Georgian symmetry with lighter, more delicate detail; an elliptical fanlight over the front door, often with sidelights; Palladian or three-part windows; thin muntins, with 6-over-6 sash most common.

Romantic styles (about 1820–1885)

• Greek Revival (about 1820–1860). Low-pitched roof, often with the gable end turned to the street like a temple front; a wide band of trim at the cornice; columns or square pilasters at the corners or porch; door surrounded by sidelights and a rectangular transom.
• Gothic Revival (about 1830–1860). Steep roof with steep cross gables; pointed-arch windows; decorative vergeboards (bargeboards) along the gable edges; on wooden "Carpenter Gothic" houses, vertical board-and-batten siding.
• Italianate (about 1840–1885). Low-pitched roof with wide overhanging eaves on decorative brackets; tall, narrow windows, often arched, with elaborate crowns; usually two or three stories; sometimes a square cupola or tower.

Victorian era (about 1855–1910)

• Second Empire (1855–1885 per Texas; 1860–1900 per Pennsylvania). The mansard roof, steep on all four sides with dormers, is the giveaway; bracketed eaves; sometimes iron cresting on the roof.
• Stick (about 1860–1890). Flat boards applied in horizontal, vertical, or diagonal patterns over the siding; decorative trusses in the gable peaks; diagonal porch braces.
• Queen Anne (about 1880–1910). Asymmetrical front with steep, irregular roof and cross gables; wraparound or partial porch; patterned shingles and textured wall surfaces; turned spindlework; often a round or polygonal corner tower; large single-pane sash, some with small colored panes around the edge.
• Shingle (about 1880–1900). Wood shingles covering walls and roof in one continuous skin; broad sweeping roofs; little applied ornament. Mostly architect-designed and less common than Queen Anne.
• Richardsonian Romanesque (1870s into the 1890s; Romanesque Revival generally 1840–1900). Heavy, massive stone or brick construction; wide round arches over entries and windows; round towers; squat columns. Rare for houses outside wealthy neighborhoods because masonry was costly.
• Folk Victorian (about 1870–1910). A plain folk house form dressed with mass-produced trim: jigsawn brackets, turned porch posts, and decorative shingles in the gable.

Revivals and new American styles (about 1880–1940)

• Colonial Revival (1880–1955 per Texas; to 1960 per Pennsylvania). Symmetrical front; accentuated front door with a pediment or small entry porch on slender columns; multi-pane sash, often in pairs; side-gabled or hipped roof. The most enduring revival style in the country.
• Tudor Revival (1890–1940 per Texas). Steep front-facing gables; decorative half-timbering on some examples; massive chimney, often on the front; tall narrow windows in groups, often with small panes.
• Prairie (about 1900–1920). Low-pitched hipped roof with very wide eaves; strong horizontal lines; massive square porch piers. Concentrated in the Midwest.
• American Foursquare (mid-1890s to late 1930s). A boxy two-and-a-half-story house, usually with a hipped roof, a central dormer, four main rooms per floor, and a full-width front porch. Often trimmed in Craftsman, Prairie, or Colonial Revival details.
• Craftsman and bungalow (1905–1930 per Texas; 1900–1930 per Pennsylvania). Low-pitched gabled roof with wide eaves; exposed rafter tails and triangular brackets; porch on square or tapered columns, often set on masonry piers that run to the ground.
• Mission (about 1890–1920). Curved, mission-shaped parapet or dormer; red tile roof; stucco walls; arched porch openings on square piers.
• Spanish Colonial Revival or Spanish Eclectic (about 1915–1940). Low-pitched red tile roof with little overhang; stucco walls; round arches; asymmetrical front. Popularized by the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.
• Art Deco (about 1925–1940) and Moderne (about 1930–1950). Deco uses smooth walls with zigzags, chevrons, and other stylized geometric ornament; Moderne drops most ornament for flat roofs, rounded corners, horizontal bands of windows, and sometimes glass block. Both are uncommon for houses.

Mid-twentieth century (about 1930–1980)

• Minimal Traditional (from about 1925). A small, usually one-story house with a low-to-medium roof, minimal eave overhang, often one front-facing gable, and very little detail.
• Cape Cod revival (boom in the 1930s–1950s). A revival of the colonial New England type: one or one-and-a-half stories, steep side-gabled roof, central door between multi-pane windows, often with dormers added.
• Ranch (about 1935–1975). Usually one story, long and low, with a low-pitched roof; asymmetrical front; carport or garage under the main roof.
• Split-level (popular from the 1950s onward). Staggered floor levels joined by short flights of stairs, typically a living level, a bedroom level a half-flight up, and a lower level with the garage or family room.
• Mid-century Modern and Contemporary (roughly 1945–1970; Texas dates Contemporary 1940–1980). Flat or low-pitched roof with deep overhangs and sometimes exposed beams; large areas of fixed glass and ribbon windows; asymmetrical, horizontal composition.

4. Clues Beyond Style: Roof, Windows, Plan, and Materials

Roof form is the fastest sorting tool from the street: mansard (Second Empire), steep front gables (Gothic Revival, Tudor), low hipped roofs with wide eaves (Italianate, Prairie, Foursquare), flat roofs (Moderne, International, some Contemporary), and long low gables or hips (Ranch).

Windows. The number of panes per sash generally drops over time: Georgian houses used 6 to 20 panes per sash, Federal houses most often 6-over-6, and Queen Anne houses large single-pane sash. Revival styles of the 20th century brought multi-pane sash back deliberately, so on a Colonial Revival house small panes do not mean an early date. Sash were also replaced often; check whether the window frames and trim look original before relying on them. NPS Preservation Brief 9, The Repair of Historic Wooden Windows, describes how traditional sash are built.

Floor plan and form. Plain houses are classified by shape instead of style. The McAlester guide's "National Folk" category, built across the country as railroads delivered cheap lumber in the mid-to-late 19th century, includes six common forms: gable-front, gable-front-and-wing, hall-and-parlor (two rooms side by side, the colonial-era plan behind many later types), I-house (two stories tall, two rooms wide, one room deep, named by geographer Fred Kniffen in a 1936 study), massed-plan side-gabled, and pyramidal. The shotgun house, one room wide with rooms in a line, was the most popular house type in the South from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s.

Porches, siding, and foundations follow the style but were the parts most often replaced. A 1920s porch on an 1880s house, or aluminum siding over clapboard, is a remodeling clue rather than a dating error. Look under porch roofs and in attics, where original siding and trim often survive.

5. Nails, Saw Marks, and Framing

When style and records disagree, the structure itself can settle the question. Look in the basement, attic, and any opened wall.

• Nails. Hand-wrought nails were standard until around 1800. Machine-cut nails, with a rectangular shank that tapers on two sides, were patented in the United States in 1795 and dominated through most of the 19th century. Round wire nails took over late in the century: in 1892 American factories produced more steel wire nails than cut nails for the first time, and by 1913 about 90 percent of nails made were wire. Original cut nails in the framing point to a pre-1890s house; all-wire nails suggest about 1890 or later. Check several locations, because repairs add newer nails.
• Saw marks. Hand-hewn beams show the scalloped marks of an adze or broadaxe. Straight, parallel saw marks come from the reciprocating up-and-down sawmill. Curved arcs come from a circular saw, which was in common use in American sawmills by the middle of the 19th century.
• Framing. Early houses used heavy timber frames joined with mortise-and-tenon joints and wooden pegs. Balloon framing, with light studs running continuously from the sill to the roof plate, first appeared in a Chicago warehouse in 1832; by the 1880s some form of 2x4 framing was standard. Platform framing, in which each floor is built as a separate deck, became prevalent from the 1920s as long lumber grew scarce, though balloon framing stayed common into the late 1940s and a braced-frame hybrid survived into the 1940s in the Northeast.
• Brick bond. The pattern of headers (brick ends) and stretchers (long sides) in a masonry wall can be compared with dated local buildings. Flemish bond alternates a header and a stretcher in every course; American or common bond runs several courses of stretchers between each course of headers. Your state historic preservation office or a local preservation architect can tell you how bond patterns changed in your area.

Our house-dating guide covers these physical clues alongside the paper trail.

6. Check What Has Already Been Written About Your House

Before you try to classify your house from scratch, find out whether a professional has already done it. Many state historic preservation offices (SHPOs) and city preservation offices have carried out architectural surveys, block by block, and recorded each building's style, approximate date, and alterations on a survey form. Ask your SHPO or city preservation planner whether your street has been surveyed; some states offer online map viewers of surveyed properties.

If your house is in a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the district's nomination form usually describes every building, often with its style and an estimated construction date, and labels each one as contributing or non-contributing. Many nomination forms are online through the National Park Service's NPGallery and its National Register database and research page. Our guide to getting a house on the National Register explains how those forms are written, and our explainer on historical building markers covers the plaques that often follow a listing.

7. Separate the Original House From Its Additions

Many houses are really two or three houses of different ages joined together. Sanborn fire insurance maps, drawn for thousands of towns from the 1860s through the mid-20th century and revised every few years, show each building's footprint, height, and material, so comparing editions reveals when a rear ell, porch, or second story appeared. Our guide to reading Sanborn fire insurance maps explains the symbols. Old photographs of the house or the street do the same job for the facade: a dated photo showing the original porch or windows tells you what the remodelers changed. Our guide to dating old photographs helps you put a year on undated prints, and your local historical society may hold photographs, survey files, and knowledge of local builders who worked in each style.

Tips for Identifying Your House's Style

• Photograph all four sides. The back and sides often keep original windows, trim, and siding that were replaced on the front.
• Start with the roof and the overall shape, then the porch, then the details. Ornament is the easiest thing to add or remove.
• Look for the neighbors. Houses on the same block built by the same builder can show what your house looked like before alterations.
• Think "style plus influences." "A gable-front folk house with Greek Revival trim" is a more accurate label than forcing a single style.
• Write down why. Record the features that support your identification so a SHPO reviewer, historical society volunteer, or future owner can check your reasoning.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find out what style my house is?

Compare the roof shape, symmetry, porch, windows, and trim to a style guide such as Virginia and Lee McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses or Pennsylvania's free online Architectural Field Guide. Then check whether your state historic preservation office or a National Register nomination has already described your house.

Can the style of a house tell me when it was built?

Only roughly. Each style has a typical span of a few decades, but styles reached small towns late, houses were remodeled, and many houses have no clear style. Use style as a starting estimate and confirm it with deeds, permits, Sanborn maps, and physical clues such as nails and framing.

What is the most common old house style in the United States?

Plain houses with little or no stylistic detail, classified by their form, such as gable-front, I-house, or side-gabled, are more common than any single textbook style. Among named styles, Colonial Revival was one of the most widely built and longest lasting.

What if my house mixes several styles?

That is normal. Builders combined popular details, and later owners added porches, windows, and siding from newer styles. Describe the house by its underlying form and original style, then list the later influences and alterations.

How can nails help date my house?

Hand-wrought nails were standard until about 1800, machine-cut nails dominated most of the 19th century, and wire nails overtook cut nails in 1892. Original cut nails in the framing suggest a house built before the 1890s, while all-wire nails suggest about 1890 or later.