What makes a Colonial house? How to recognise one

“Colonial” covers a long stretch of American building, and several traditions. The earliest English houses of New England, of the seventeenth century, were timber-framed houses on the medieval English pattern, with a massive central chimney, small casements and often a long rear roof, the saltbox. The Dutch of the Hudson Valley, the Spanish of Florida and the Southwest and the French of the Mississippi each built in their own ways. The house most people mean by Colonial is the one that followed, from about 1700: the Georgian house of the English colonies, which continued after independence as the Federal style until about 1830.

What to look for

The roof. Side-gabled, of moderate pitch, originally covered in wood shingles; hipped on grander houses; a gambrel in New England and the Dutch districts. Chimneys tell the region: a single large chimney in the middle of the roof in early New England, a pair at the ends or inside the roof in Georgian houses of the north, and in Virginia and the Carolinas big brick stacks built outside the end walls.

The windows. Double-hung sash windows of many small panes, nine over nine or twelve over twelve in the early eighteenth century, six over six later, in even rows across the front. Shutters, when original, were sized to close over the window and hung on hinges.

The door. In the center of the front, panelled, framed by pilasters with a pediment or a flat entablature over it, and in Georgian houses a row of small panes above it. The Federal house of after about 1780 has an elliptical fanlight, often with narrow sidelights either side of the door, and lighter, thinner detail throughout.

The materials. Painted clapboard over a timber frame in New England; brick in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas; fieldstone in Pennsylvania. A cornice runs along the eaves, often with a row of dentils.

The plan. A center hall from front to back with the stair in it, and two rooms either side, often two deep. Smaller houses had a hall and parlor side by side, or a side hall with the rooms to one side of it.

The porch. Usually none, or a small stoop with a hood over the door. A wide front porch on a Colonial house is almost always a nineteenth-century addition.

℟Building from the pattern book

Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.

What it is confused with

The Colonial Revival, from the 1880s to the 1950s, built more Colonial houses than the colonists did. Its houses are usually larger and less strict: windows paired or set in threes, often of six or eight panes over a single pane; a door surround that exaggerates the old ones, with a broken pediment or a fanlight too big for the door; side porches, sunrooms and garages. The joinery is machine-made and the clapboards thinner and more even. A Cape Cod, a house of one and a half storeys with dormers, may be either old or revival. The Greek Revival of about 1825 to 1860 turns the gable end to the street like a temple front, with a wide plain frieze under the eaves, and is often mistaken for Federal.

The rules its builders followed

Few Colonial houses were designed by architects. Housewrights built them from English pattern books, those of Batty Langley, William Halfpenny and James Gibbs, and after 1797 from Asher Benjamin’s books, written for American builders and adapted to timber. They kept the Palladian rule that the rooms on one side of the hall should match those on the other.

℟Rooms paired about the axis

Place rooms on the right of the entrance equal and corresponding to those on the left, so that the house is alike on both sides and the walls bear the roof equally.