American Craftsman Style Homes

The style incorporated locally handcrafted wood, glass, and metal work that is both simple and elegant. A reaction to Victorian opulence and the increasingly common mass-produced housing elements, the style incorporated clean lines, sturdy structure, and natural materials. The name comes from a popular magazine published in the early 1900s by furniture maker Gustav Stickley called The Craftsman, which featured original house and furniture designs by Harvey Ellis, the Greene brothers, and others. The designs, while influenced by the ideals of the British movement, found inspiration in specifically American antecedents such as Shaker furniture and the Mission style. Emphasis on the originality of the artist/craftsman led to the new design concepts of the Art Deco movement of the 1930s.

* Low-pitched roof lines, gabled or hipped roof

* Deeply overhanging eaves,

* Exposed rafters or decorative brackets under eaves

* Front porch beneath extension of main roof

* Tapered, square columns supporting roof

* 4-over-1 or 6-over-1 double-hung windows

* Frank Lloyd Wright design motifs

* Hand-crafted stone or woodwork

* Mixed materials throughout structure

The American Craftsman style has its origins in the earlier British Arts and Crafts movement which dates back to the 1860s. The British movement, which spawned a wide variety of related but conceptually very distinct design movements throughout Europe, was a reaction to the degradation of the dignity of human labor resulting from the Industrial Revolution. In many ways it was a reaction against the over-decorated aesthetic and disregard for the worker of the Victorian era. Seeking to ennoble the craftsman once again, the movement emphasized the hand-made over the mass-produced.

While the British movement still contained some of the over-done decoration of its Victorian precursor, it was almost anti-Victorian in philosophy; the movement's founder, William Morris, was a staunch socialist and as such the philosophy behind the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK is clearly part of the materialist dialectic. However, the expensive materials and expensive hand-made techniques meant that the movement was in fact serving the wealthiest clients, a seeming contradiction to its roots in socialist philosophy.

While the British movement was a Victorian-era phenomenon, its translation to the American setting took place precisely at the moment when that era was coming to a close. It can be said that the American movement that also emphasized craftsmanship was also a design reform movement that encouraged originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of handicraft, and was concerned with ennobling the more modest home of the rapidly expanding American middle class.

California Bungalows, commonly called simply bungalows in America, are a form of residential structure that were widely popular across America and, to some extent, the world around the years 1910 to 1925.

Bungalows are 1 or 1½ story houses, with sloping roofs and eaves with unenclosed rafters, and typically feature a gable (or an attic vent designed to look like one) over main portion of the house. Ideally, bungalows were horizontal in massing, and are integrated with the earth by use of local materials and transitional plantings. This helps create the signature look most people associate with the California Bungalow.

Bungalows commonly have wood shingle, horizontal siding or stucco exteriors, as well as brick or stone exterior chimneys and a partial-width front porch. Larger bungalows might have asymmetrical "L" shaped porches. The porches were often enclosed at a later date, in response to increased street noise. A "California" bungalow (except in Australia, see below) is not made of brick, but in other bungalows, most notably in the Chicago area, this is commonplace.

Bellingham Washington is home to hundreds of beautiful craftsman style homes. In fact, most of the photos in this lens were taken of homes in Bellingham. If you are interested in buying or selling a craftsman style home in Bellingham, check out my website...

The Bellingham Washington real estate inventory for Craftsman Style Homes.