Long Live the Queen!
by Michael Bridgeman
The reign of Queen Anne—as an American architectural style—ended more than 100 years ago. In its heyday, the style was immensely popular across the country. The Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory [a] has records for 1,007 Queen Anne houses in Dane County, and 490 in Madison. Though the branches of the family tree have grown slender and sparse, I’ve tracked down some local, modern-day descendants that demonstrate clear bloodlines.
Click images to view in full screen
Popular from about 1880 until 1910, the Queen Anne style was easily adapted to houses from grand to humble. The imposing Curtis-Kittleson (1102 Spaight St.) is fashioned of masonry with a generous veranda that wraps around a tower. The Wootten House (1229 E. Johnson St.) packs a lot of Queen Anne features into a small cottage. The Hobbins Investment House (24 E. Gorham St.) is, like most local examples, somewhere between grand and humble.
The Queen Anne style emerged in England in the 1860s and was soon adapted by American architects, builders, and homeowners. Its popularity was stimulated by magazines and pattern books as well as the booming availability of milled woodwork easily distributed through growing railroad networks. Queen Anne houses are typically irregular in plan and massing. Roofs are steeply pitched, mixing hip, gable, and other forms. A single house will have multiple surface textures, such as clapboards and shingles. Cutaway bay windows are common, with towers and turrets less so. Porches can be small or sweeping wraparounds. Ornament may include spindle work, so-called free classical details, or decorative half-timbering. [b]
Queen Anne’s Progeny
This background is a prelude to the task at hand: to show evidence of Queen Anne influences in houses built within the last 35 years and around Madison. I’ve collected modern houses below in three groups. These are not formal categories, but simply a way to organize Neo-Queen Anne what I have found.
Houses with Towers
Leonard and Kate Gay House, Madison (1893)
For many observers, towers or turrets are a quintessential feature of a Queen Anne house. They may be round, square, or polygonal. The Curtis-Kittleson House, shown at the beginning of the post, and the Gay House (1101 Rutledge St.) are located on opposite sides of Orton Park and make a good compare-and-contrast pairing. Built eight years apart, they have contemporary descendants in our area.
6921 Breunig Rd., Roxbury (date unknown)
A hilltop residence in the Town of Roxbury unabashedly emulates the Queen Anne style and commands long views of the rural countryside. Multiple roof forms — gable, hip and octagon — emphasize the irregular massing of the house. The substantial tower occupies a prominent corner and is wrapped by a large veranda framed with thin columns and spindles in the frieze under the cornice and the railing. Other Queen Anne features include a cutaway bay window, brackets under the eaves, and decorative openwork in the gables.
1627 Tierney Dr., Waunakee (date unknown)
Built in a suburban neighborhood on a large parcel, this Waunakee house stands apart from its neighbors. It is less emphatically styled than the Roxbury house, but still has enough features to mark it as Neo-Queen Anne. Most notable is the square tower where the front-facing wing meets the main body of the house. Scalloped shingles appear on the tower while the rest of the house is covered by narrow clapboards [c] with vertical siding in the front gable. The wrap-around veranda has spindle balusters and no frieze.
6 Pebble Beach Circle, Madison (1994)
This brick house in Madison, in a denser setting, has an L-shaped plan with the longer wing facing the street. Its masonry cladding makes it uncommon among Queen Anne houses, whether built in the 1890s or the 1990s. Despite its linear façade, this Neo-Queen Anne displays nearly all the characteristics of the style: multiple roof forms; a bay that becomes an octagonal tower; various window sizes and shapes including three with pointed arches not visible on a side facade; gables with scalloped shingles and openwork decoration; and a porch with narrow columns and spindle work.
Intermediate Houses
What I’m calling intermediate houses were generally not as grand as those described above —though some had towers — and others were small cottages like the Wootten House. I’ve not identified any Neo-Queen Anne houses that I would call a “cottages,” but here are examples of recently built houses with genetic traces of their forbears.
Elizabeth and James Bull House, Madison (1891)
The Bull House (1734 Jefferson St.) is at the more elaborate end on my imaginary intermediate scale. Situated on a corner lot, it’s quite large but has no tower or veranda; there is a small spindle-work porch at the main entry and a smaller porch at a secondary entry to the left. The gables have highly decorated cornices and both street façades have two-story cutaway bays. Notice the square window above the main entry; it’s a common Queen Anne detail, with two appearing on the Wootten cottage at the beginning of this post.
1112 Spaight St., Madison (2012)
The house at 1112 Spaight St. is a great grand-niece of the Bull House. The most recent of the Neo-Queen Anne houses I’m including, it’s a simplified version of is ancestor. The full-width porch is a nice touch, as are the support posts with chamfered corners. Two cutaway bays are visible in this view, though the shingles in the gables do not have the detailed patterning of historical examples. This house is next door to the Curtis-Kittleson House (first photo in this post) and caused a kerfuffle when it replaced a 112-year-old vernacular house. Madison’s preservation planner wrote that its demolition “would be damaging to the greater integrity of the [Third Lake Ridge] historic district.” Nonetheless, the Landmarks Commission voted in support of demolition. [d]
1502 Sunset Ct., Middleton (date unknown)
I have found several Neo-Queen Anne houses like this one in Middleton. They have cross-gabled roofs, a form seen in many houses old and new, where the main ridgeline is usually parallel to the street elevation with a smaller, perpendicular wing to one side. Here it’s the style details that put the house in the Neo-Queen Anne category. Scalloped shingles cover the two-story cutaway bay which has open work under the tip of the gable. The turned porch columns have elaborate scrolled brackets while a diamond-shaped window appears to the left of the door (see also the Pebble Beach Circle house above). The sidelights that frame the entry door are a flourish rarely seen on historical Queen Anne houses.
Row Houses
The row house is not a building type found in Madison during the Queen Anne era of 1880 to 1910, though there are narrow detached houses that can be seen as cousins. The row house emerged here a century later with the construction of condominiums in central Madison, several of which adapted Queen Anne styling.
J. Leuders House, Madison (1896)
The Queen Anne style worked even when space was at a premium as with the Lueders House (650 E. Johnson St.). The only visible elevation on this detached house is the street façade, making it a once-removed ancestor of the row houses. Still, it has a two-story cutaway bay, scalloped shingles in the gables, and large brackets under the primary gable. The broken scroll pediment over the attic window is a “free classic” touch of the sort that became popular in Queen Anne houses during the 1890s.
George W. Peck Row House, Milwaukee (1883) [1]
The Peck Row House in Milwaukee (1620-1630 N. Farwell Ave.) is a fine example of the Queen Anne style applied to this especially urban housing type. Here the first story of the six-unit building is sheathed in brick and the upper stories are covered with wood shingles in at least two patterns. Each of the covered porches has a unique design and there are multiple gable forms at the third story.
Hancock Court, Madison (1992/93)
The row house at Hancock Court (132-152 S. Hancock St.) is one part of a project that included refurbishing an 1891 apartment building next door and erecting new carriage houses at the rear of the property. Its Neo-Queen Anne lineage is most evident in the polygonal turrets at each end of the row as well as the brackets that appear under the cornice across the entire façade. The garage doors are a concession to modern life.
Third Lake Ridge City Homes, Madison (2004)
The twenty-unit building of Third Lake Ridge City Homes (1037 Williamson St.) is a particularly successful display of Neo-Queen Anne style in a neighborhood that has many historical models nearby. The street elevation is enlivened by three bays (each one different) and a tower, all of which project slightly from the facade, while several porches and dormers are recessed. Forms and details vary across the row with different treatments of gables, shingling, and stick-work. The Palladian window in the central gable is a nod to the “free classic” period of the Queen Anne style.
Conjuring the Past
How does one explain Neo-Queen Anne design? It can be about context and compatibility with the surroundings. It may be a kind of nostalgia. Or it could be a simple matter of taste. Even as we needlessly demolish too many old buildings, we continue to pine for earlier styles — Colonial, Tudor, French Provincial, Prairie, or whatever. We even make up styles like American Farmhouse that evoke a longing for an unspecific past that bends easily to modern lifestyles. Imitation is not preservation, but it can be flattery. And sometimes flattery can be sincere.
. . .
Notes
[a] Architecture and History Inventory (AHI). https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2834 Wisconsin Historical Society. These numbers are for houses only. I concentrate on houses because of the range and quantity of historic examples in our area, keeping in mind that the Queen Anne style was also applied to commercial, public, and other building types.
[b] Virginia Savage McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses (revised). Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2015. p. 344 ff.; Barbara Wyatt (ed.). Cultural Resource Management in Wisconsin: Vols. 1-3, A Manual for Historic Properties. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1987. Vol. 2, (Architecture), p. 2-15.; Bruce Wentworth. Ask the Architect.org http://www.askthearchitect.org/architectural-styles/queen-anne-style-architecture1
[c] I’m using the terminology of traditional wood cladding even though most contemporary construction uses vinyl or other engineered materials intended to mimic wood.
[d] Pat Schneider. “Fate of tiny Spaight Street house sets off interesting tussle.” The Capital Times. Nov. 23, 2011. p. 9.
Image Credits
[1] Wisconsin Historical Society Architecture & History Index. AHI #75176. 2014.
All other photos by Michael Bridgeman.