Italienate (mid 1860s to 1880s

Tall and stately, the Italianate house is easily identified by its pronounced vertical lines. A two-story, slanted bay takes up about two-thirds of the front, and a raised porch with handsome portico fills the remaining third and visually balances the prominent bay. At the roofline, a projecting cornice is supported by concave, curved brackets, although the roof itself may actually be lower than this "false front" would suggest. In the past, cresting was the crowning touch, but most of this iron lace is long lost to metal salvage for post-Victorian war efforts.

Because the Italianate style is a California adaptation of stone structures built in seventeenth century Italy, certain architectural elements have been translated from stone into native redwood and douglas fir. The square quoins at the corners of an Italianate house are decorative versions of the original masonry reinforcements, and the corinthian columns on the porch are carved from wood, not chipped from marble. Other imitation elements, such as brackets, panels, and keystones, communicate substance and stature critical to the successful appearance of the facade.

The windows on an Italianate house have a three dimensional quality that makes them resemble sculpture more than conventional panes of glass. Long and narrow, the measurements of the win-dow and its many accessories are carefully proportioned to the size of the whole house. The shape, as well as the size, of the window frame, for example, is as graceful as it is distinctive: arched, notched or indented, it is rarely just rectangular. Slender colonettes to either side of the window, a protruding sill beneath, a decorative shield above, and a squeezed pediment, segmented hood or bay cornice to top it all off, turn the window into a spectacular event, not just something to look through.

The front door also reaches out to the street. Beginning with sculpted newel posts at the bottom of the front steps, the extended entrance continues right up the staircase with turned railing balusters to the partially fluted columns on the front porch. Overhead, a portico, which may in turn support another balustrade, shades the front door, itself much more than a flat, plain surface. The solid wood is divided into recessed rectangular panels, and the glass is cut for sparkling highlights.

Inside there is a long hall, with a series of doors. The first leads to the gentlemen's parlor, the second to the ladies' parlor with an additional bay window of its own, the third to the dining room, and the last, at the back of the house, to the kitchen. Within the rooms, arched passageways, reminiscent of the window shapes, provide a more formal transition from one space to the next. Sliding wood panels, solid and incised like the front door, close off the rooms for privacy as well as more efficient heating. Even the white fireplace picks up its decorative theme from the facade, with its mantel supported by curved brackets and its round, arched opening, just like the cornice outside.

The ceilings are high, often twelve feet or more. To break up the expanse of wall, wood wainscotting or lincrusta-walton covers the first four feet from the floor. A strip of molding circumscribes the room at, or a foot or so below, the seam where wall and ceiling meet. Wallpaper, typically floral and sometimes garish, extends from wainscot to molding. These techniques make the tall rooms more in scale with the size of people. Some builders installed a coved ceiling instead of a cornice because it was a less costly design feature. The rounded corners give these airy spaces a comfortable sense of enclosure.

When you look up to see just how high that high ceiling is, you discover an elaborate plaster rosette, some three feet in diameter, from which to suspend chandeliers. Originally the ceiling was wallpapered and the rosette was painted a rainbow of colors - the grapes purple, the leaves green, the roses rose. When your neck gets stiff and you look down, you find yourself standing on wall-to-wall carpeting with an Oriental rug on top. The Italianate room envelopes you with things to see.

Excerpt from "Rehab Right - How to Rehabilitate Your Oakland House
Without Sacrificing Architectural Assets"