craftsman style

i was reading house blogs this morning, and one very sweet couple was worried about the authenticity of their house (hm...you don't know anyone who obsesses about these things, do you? you don't know anyone who dragged her feet deciding whether she really wanted to work on this queen anne because she knew she didn't want to restore it to queen anne glory, and felt guilty about that? yeah, i got over that and decided that it was okay. but these kids are lucky enough to be building an architecturally swell house--designed after one they found in a 1905 issue of the craftsman magazine (how awesome is that? how jealous are you?). (oh--and when i say building? i mean building. i mean they're out there with saws and wood and nails, on the land, doing the work. amazing.)

anyway, i think they're adorable, and i felt bad that they felt bad about their pride and joy. especially needlessly. apparently they read something that gave them the impression that their house wasn't really a craftsman unless it was built from stickley plans. and i thought this was nonsense--stickley plans just make it a stickley house--a wonderful thing, to be sure, but not the only thing that makes a house a craftsman house.

so i've pulled out my copy of the mcalester field guide (how much do i love this book?) (answer: lots). and here's how the mcalesters define what makes a house a craftsman house. the craftsman period was prominent from about 1905 to about 1930. craftsman homes have low-pitched, gabled roofs,   though occasionally you see hipped ones, with wide, unenclosed eave overhangs, roof rafters usually exposed, with decorative ones added if the supporting rafters weren't enough :), a full- or partial-width porch supported by tapered square columns that often extend to ground level with no break or change at porch-floor level.

m&c's house is a side-gabled roof, which are what about a third of craftsman homes are (as opposed to the front-gabled roofs in the previous two gabled-roof photos). here's a side-gabled roof example from the city of new westminster's web site:

their house plans don't show particularly typically craftsman porch supports--typically, the shorter, squared supports would would rest on massive piers or upon one huge balustrade going around the whole porch, either of which begins at ground level and continues above the porch floor. if they wanted, they could easily make this cosmetic change. the canadian example shown here, though, has slim porch supports going all the way to the ground, just grouped in pairs for more substance. the mcalesters note that a floor-to-ceiling column may have been more common before 1910; since m&c's plans originated in 1905, it makes sense that their columns would authentically have such columns.

another cosmetic difference between m&c's house and the typical craftsman might be the exposed roof rafters, though it's hard to tell from the sketch. wherever the roof joins a wall, on a typical craftsman, the horizontal supports for the roof just continue beyond the wall and are exposed outside. often, apparently, these were added decoratively after the fact. (i think i remember seeing m&c cutting some of these in an old post, in fact, even though they aren't visible in the sketch of their house, so maybe they're already planning this.)

i love that they're doing the wood shingles on their house that are so common in craftsman homes (second only to clapboard in popularity). they're staining them one by one. can you believe it?

and, perhaps most interestingly, the primary inspiration for craftsman style, according to the mcalesters, wasn't stickley at all, but greene and greene (another point of great contention, i'm sure). they don't mention stickley at all.

anyway, i think m&c are doing a wonderful thing, building their home, and building *this* home--using a lot of salvaged materials, too, in their work--and that certainly honors the spirit that built the craftsman movement, regardless of who did or didn't design this or that. i think they should be proud of themselves and not worry about the rest :) but then, this is the girl who decided it was okay to put midcentury modern furniture inside her queen anne. just because she likes it.

Comments

[Cherie]

A thorough explanation! One that we were too lazy to do.

Honestly, "worried" would be the wrong word. We aren't worried. Our house is no more and no less authentic than every other house in America. Is a modular Cape with vinyl siding not a true Cape? Is a Queen Anne with modern furniture or paint a fake? Where is the line?

What we were more interested in is that the true Craftsmen people seem to be trying to reclaim the word. I think that they might argue that "Craftsman" as a term has been bandied about a bit recklessly, and that the term should only be applied to those houses that were built on Stickley plans from the Craftsman magazine. Everything else is just a part of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Using their guidelines, we were then trying to determine where our house would fall.

See? It's quite a conundrum.

PS- We will evetually be building up the porch columns with stone. But, given modern building codes, we had to have pressure-treated ground-to-ceiling supports first.