19th Century Italian Styles

Table Of Content

• Key Elements of the Italianate Style
• Why Builders Loved the Italianate Style
• Andrew Jackson Downing
• Key Characteristics of Italianate Architecture
• Spanish Revival in Santa Monica
• About This 1800’s Historic House For Sale In Johnson City Tennessee
• National Trust for Historic Preservation: Return to home page
• b) Ashton Villa

Additionally, the sun trap garden has an amazing assortment of fruit trees. Italianate architecture has decorative columns supporting a first-story porch. Throughout the years, many people remodeled their porches and did away with the original style. The porch column leads to a double-door entrance, specifically to let in light and provide ventilation.

Key Elements of the Italianate Style

Italianate was also a common style for modest structures like barns and for larger public buildings such as town halls, libraries, and train stations. You will find Italianate buildings in nearly every part of the United States except for the deep South. There are fewer Italianate buildings in the southern states because the style reached its peak during the Civil War, a time when the south was economically devastated. For a few decades in the 19th century, Italianate was one of the fastest developing and most popular architectural styles in the United States. The principal block is flanked by two lower asymmetrical secondary wings that contribute picturesque massing, best appreciated from an angled view.

Why Builders Loved the Italianate Style

The countryside and the suburbs, on the other hand, offered an excellent counterpoint to these urban ills—at least for those who could afford to move to the country. Well-designed, “tasteful” houses like the villa and the bracketed cottage were essential to a happy, healthy suburban existence. And even though landscaping was important to its inception, the style was adapted in urban areas, too. The fictional home of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City is among many iconic New York brownstones in the Italianate style. Historic single-family homes in the United States include the John Muir house built in California in 1882, and the 1860 Ulysses S. Grant house in Galena, Illinois.

Andrew Jackson Downing

Italianate roofs tend to have a low pitch, sometimes featuring a square cupola on the top. The cornices of these buildings are often characterized by projecting eaves with large brackets in various shapes and spacing. These brackets may be arranged individually or in pairs and are typically adorned with wide decorative bands and sometimes further embellished with panel moldings. Overall, the brackets and cornices of Italianate buildings are an essential part of their architectural style and are meant to be highly ornamental. Queen Victoria ruled England for a long, long time — from 1837 until her death in 1901 — so Victorian architecture is more a time frame than a specific style.

Before publishing Rural Residences, his first pattern book for picturesque residences in the Gothic Revival and Italianate styles, he illustrated Downing’s pattern books. More than just a “simple box with a lot of ornamentation,” Italianate architecture is a less formal, more romantic, and flexible style that could be applied to mansions and grand country estates as well as middle-class homes and row houses. Taking a cue from the Renaissance villas and rambling farmhouses of northern Italy, the style is fanciful, and a stark contrast to the clean and symmetrical lines of Neoclassic architecture. Italianate aesthetics were adapted to a range of building types and adapted for a range of income levels, including spacious homes on sprawling properties for the wealthy, and city brownstones and row houses on smaller lots. The rise of mass production meant that fashionable Italianate architectural details could be easily and affordably produced and applied to buildings to create a nod to the style, albeit in a simplified version.

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During the Victorian era, emerging styles captured a large audience by the widely-published house pattern books packed with building plans and home building advice. Prominent designers and illustrators published many plans for Italianate and Gothic Revival style homes. Downing was primarily a landscape designer and social reformer rather than an architect. He relied heavily on the designs of others, notably the English-born Calvert Vaux and fellow New Yorker Alexander Jackson Davis, to illustrate his books. (Both Vaux and Davis produced their own architectural-pattern books as well as contributing to Downing’s.) That is not to say that Downing was committed solely to the Italianate style, however.

About This 1800’s Historic House For Sale In Johnson City Tennessee

We seek qualified architects and designers who are committed to excellence. “Italianate” is the most freewheeling of a series of Renaissance-inspired styles ca. Italianate style waned during the postwar economic troubles of the 1870s. By the time things picked up, such Late Victorian favorites as the Queen Anne and Stick styles and the early Colonial Revival were in vogue. This high-style Italian Villa in brick has a central campanile and robust eave brackets. Italianate styles reigned for half a century, during which Rococo, Renaissance Revival, and cottage furniture made their appearance.

Flat-woven Venetian carpeting and ingrains—reversible carpets made up of narrow strips sewn together to span the room—were affordable. Luxury (pile) carpets included Axminster, Wilton, Brussels, and tapestry. The Italian forms and the Gothic Revival arrived at about the same time, two picturesque styles that ended Greek Revival’s long reign. In England, Gothic would become the predominant style of the Romantic or early Victorian period. In America, however, the Italianate had become far and away the most fashionable architectural style by the 1860s. Builders nationwide would use its vocabulary almost until the end of the century.

b) Ashton Villa

Additionally, the brackets are adorned with wide decorative bands and other details. On top of that, there were decorative elements in the trim and crown all around the windows. Additionally, with this architectural style, it is important that the decorative elements differed between windows. This is why rectangular Italianate windows always have pedimented crowns.

This can be seen in the main characteristic, which emphasizes vertical orientation and has also shaped the modern era. As the architectural eclecticism of the postwar era enveloped America, the appeal of Italian style dimmed, but took its own sweet time to leave the scene completely. As late as 1876, the style was featured in Atwood’s Modern American Homesteads, and the book’s back pages carried an advertisement for Bicknell’s Village Builder, proudly displaying a gloriously ornamented Italian house.

There’s no denying that Italianate architecture was often merely a way to apply fashionable ornamentation and interesting shapes to traditional center-hall houses—which was good news for the culturally timid. In more ambitious hands, however, the style could readily become the means of providing flexible, asymmetrical floor plans that made home life easier for families. Italianate rowhouses usually are symmetrical, have overhanging eaves, and ornamented porches, windows, and doorways.

In the optimistic quarter-century before the Civil War, adventuresome American homebuilders had more design options than ever before in the nation’s history. Many people confuse cupolas and belvederes, which makes sense, given that they serve similar purposes (to ventilate and allow natural light into a building). When picturing a cupola, many recall small, round cupolas like that at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. And if they are big enough that a person can comfortably stand in it and look out of its windows, as many of them were, it becomes a belvedere. The Italianate revival was comparatively less prevalent in Scottish architecture,[citation needed] examples include some of the early work of Alexander Thomson ("Greek" Thomson) and buildings such as the west side of George Square.

Williams-Ellis incorporated fragments of demolished buildings, including works by a number of other architects. Portmeirion's architectural bricolage and deliberately fanciful nostalgia have been noted as an influence on the development of postmodernism in architecture in the late 20th century. While hurricane Ike almost destroyed the house, major renovations saved it. Fortunately, the mansion maintains its original first-floor interior rooms, gold filigree, and beautiful architecture. Additionally, the house provides abreathtaking background of classical architecture and offers a template for other country houses to pick from. Italianate buildings were also a departure from the era’s dominant designs in terms of style, technology, and architecture.

Italianate porches were large enough to accommodate a small sitting nook area in the summer. Furthermore, while Italianate architecture residences were not the biggest houses in the world, they were magnificent and large. Italianate window sashes typically had one-over-one or two-over-two glazing. Window trim had exuberant variations including U-shaped crowns with brackets or pedimented crowns with decorated hoods. Arched and curved windows were popularized in America by the Italianate trend. Italianate remained the preferred house style in the U.S. until the 1870s, when the Civil War curbed the progress of construction.