Queen Ann (1883 to 1890’s)

When an 1883 issue of California Architect and Building News introduced what came to be known as the Queen Anne style to the Bay Area, it marked a dramatic departure from the rigorously vertical Italianate and San Francisco Stick style houses. The Queen Anne house is certainly more horizontal in appearance, but more important, it is an absolute concoction of volumes and textures. Round corner towers with peaked witch's caps intersect steeply pitched gables with appliqued sunbursts. Recessed upstairs balconies with turned balustrades overlook prominent front porches trimmed with arched lattice-work. The arrangement of forms appears haphazard, and the assortment of surfaces is totally unrestrained. Horizontal bands of masonry, scalloped shingles, colorful tiles--or stucco made to look like tiles, carved wood work, plaster garlands, and "artist's glass" mark an irregular progression of stories from foundation to oriel to attic. There is no single roofline, but a picturesque composition of merging shapes. Nor is there a single window pane: the upper portion of each double-hung window is surrounded by small squares of flashed glass. And if there still wasn't enough color, two pieces of glass would be installed together to create the hue of a third.

If the Italianate house is like a svelte, prim dandy standing at attention, his frilled cravat spilling over velvet lapels, then the Queen Anne house is like a buxom gypsy, her ruffled skirts, billowing blouse and patterned kerchiefs infinitely artful, but always in disarray and never quite matching. Despite the discrepancy between the two images, both styles are expressive, even extroverted, in true Victorian spirit.

The striking change in image was eased by central heating, admittedly more important in the East. There, by the late 1870's, it was no longer necessary for rooms to be shut off to keep the heat in and the cold out, so the circulation pattern was not constrained to long corridors with an endless series of doors. The influence spread westward, and here too the Queen Anne has a grand hall at the heart of the house--symbol of gracious living-- and the rooms radiate out from the central core. Rejecting the strict lines of the Italianate and San Francisco Stick floor plan, the interior spaces in the Queen Anne house flow from one to another, with dimen-sions as irregular as the exterior silhouette suggests. Sometimes a freestanding staircase rises like an island in a two-story high living room; sometimes an inglenook provides a cozy recess next to the fireplace with a comfortable bench for reading and rest.

Derived from the rambling manor houses of British architect Norman Shaw, the Queen Anne style was popularized under the banner of "picturesque." Style books, like Palliser's, magazines like Harper's, and essays, like those of Andrew Jackson Downing, promoted the picturesque mode as the pinnacle of good taste. It was most desirable, even democratic, to design a building whose informal arrangement of forms and textures communicated a "wild ruggedness." Asymmetric patterns, emphasizing shape, light and color, were the calling cards of domestic design.

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