What makes a Craftsman house? How to recognise one

The Craftsman house is American, and belongs to the first three decades of the twentieth century. It took its name from Gustav Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman (1901–16), which published house designs for its readers, and its most popular form, the one-storey bungalow, took its American shape in California, where the Greene brothers made it an art. Plan books and mail-order kit houses from Sears, Roebuck and others carried it to the suburbs of every American city, and the California bungalow was copied as far away as Australia.

What to look for

The roof. Low-pitched, gabled or hipped, with wide eaves that overhang the walls by two feet or more. The ends of the rafters show under the eaves, and triangular braces or brackets sit under the gables. A wide dormer often lights rooms in the roof of a bungalow of one and a half storeys.

The porch. Deep enough to sit and eat in, across all or part of the front, under the main roof or under a gable of its own. Its posts are thick and square, often tapered, and stand on piers of brick or stone or run down to the porch wall.

℟The porch as an outdoor room

Build a deep porch, eight or nine feet, usually recessed under the main roof, on sturdy posts or piers, big enough to sit and eat in: in summer it is the living room of the house.

The windows. Double-hung windows with several tall panes in the upper sash over a single pane below, or casements, grouped in twos and threes, with broad, plain wood trim.

The door. A wooden door with a band of small panes in its upper part, set under the porch and often flanked by small windows.

The materials. Wood shingles or clapboard, often both on one wall, divided at a belt course; river stone or dark, irregular clinker brick for the chimney, the porch piers and the foundation; stucco in California and the Southwest. Materials are shown for what they are.

The plan. The front door opens almost straight into the living room, built round a big fireplace with built-in bookcases and seats. The dining room opens widely off it, and the bedrooms lie along a short hall to one side, with the bathroom between them.

℟The living room at the heart of the house

Do without the parlour kept for show, and reduce the entrance hall to a small vestibule or a nook of the living room: let the front door open, through it, into a living room built round a large fireplace, open widely into the dining room, with seats, bookcases and cupboards built into its walls.

What it is confused with

The American Foursquare, a square house of two full storeys under a hipped roof with a dormer and a full-width porch, was built in the same years and often given Craftsman details; its height and its box shape set it apart from the bungalow. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses share the low roofs and banded windows, but their roofs are usually hipped and still flatter, their walls often stucco, and they stress long horizontal lines and a hearth at the center of a cross-shaped plan. The ranch house of the 1940s and 1950s, which grew out of the bungalow, is longer and lower still, with a shallow eave, a picture window, an attached garage and seldom a deep front porch.

The rules its builders followed

Stickley’s rules were rules of honesty and of family life, drawn from Ruskin and Morris: show each material as it is, build the furniture into the house, do without the parlour kept for visitors, and make the porch a room. Many of the details that people now call Craftsman, the tapered posts and the brackets under the gables, came from the builders and the plan books rather than from Stickley himself.

℟Truth to materials

Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.